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NOPE · AI and people

AI incidents

Reports of AI-related harm and adverse experiences affecting people’s safety, wellbeing, rights and livelihoods. Explore what happened and the evidence available.

NOPE’s core concern is when AI communicates with a person, acts on their behalf, or depicts or impersonates them. The tracker also records consequential decisions, claims and privacy harms involving AI. Each case needs a described connection between AI use and the harm, including private information recorded into or disclosed to an AI service. Each account is reviewed for publication; claims may remain uncorroborated or disputed. How we review and count cases

In this selection

Published cases
93
Countries with reported events
12
Located 65 of 93 cases · 28 unknown
Languages in checked sources
13
Recorded for 93 of 93 cases

18 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 6 not yet reviewed and 12 reviewed as unknown. Show these cases

These figures describe the cases collected by NOPE. Coverage varies with discovery, reporting and available evidence. They do not estimate how often AI-related harm occurs.

Response counts currently use each case’s principal recorded outcome. Further proceedings may be described in its account.

Cases in this selection, counted once in their first known event year. A series may continue beyond that year. Reporting and collection dates are excluded. NOPE has searched recent events more thoroughly than earlier years, so bar heights also reflect collection effort.

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93 of 868 published cases · page 3 of 5

23 Jul 2023United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers

Police in New Mexico handcuffed two sisters, one a child, after a Flock plate camera misread a digit and flagged their car as stolen, lawsuits say; settled 2025

On 23 July 2023 Española police officers pulled over a car driven by a 21-year-old woman with her 12-year-old sister as a passenger, after a Flock Safety camera at an intersection flagged the car's plate as belonging to a vehicle stolen in Rio Rancho. According to the sisters' lawsuits, reported by the Santa Fe New Mexican in January 2024, the camera had read a 2 on the plate as a 7, and officers handcuffed both sisters and placed them in the backs of separate police vehicles before discovering the error; the older sister had asked an officer to call their mother, who lived nearby, to collect the girl. The suits sought damages for anxiety, fear, worry and restriction of movement. Business Insider, which reviewed the body-camera footage and incident report, reported in March 2026 that officers said the number was obscured by a license plate cover although it is visible in the footage, and that the family settled with the city in 2025.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Settled

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 04/10/2026

11 Apr 2024United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers

Toledo, Ohio: police stopped a man's pickup at gunpoint in April 2024 after a Flock license-plate camera misread his plate as stolen, released a police dog that bit him, and charged him; prosecutors dropped the charges and he later settled a lawsuit for $35,000

On 11 April 2024 Toledo police officers stopped a pickup truck after a Flock license-plate camera alerted them to a stolen plate. According to the police report and body-camera footage reported by 13abc and ABC News, the camera had misread the plate, which was not stolen. Officers drew their guns, ordered the driver out and to the ground, and a K-9 handler released a police dog as he began to kneel. The driver told ABC News he was bitten seven times on his forearm and elbow, was traumatized and could not work; he was arrested and charged with obstruction, resisting arrest and, later, failure to comply. Prosecutors dropped all charges in August 2024. The department found the dog deployment within policy and reprimanded the officer who made the stop for failing to visually verify the plate against the reader's information. Business Insider reported in March 2026 that police records show the camera read a 7 on the plate as a 2, that the man lost feeling in his fingers, gave up his lawn-care business and forklift work, sold his truck and was evicted, and that he had sued the officer and the city and settled in October for $35,000.

Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Settled

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 04/10/2026

17 Sept 2023United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system

Reno casino's facial recognition wrongly matched a patron to a barred man and police jailed him for about eleven hours, his federal lawsuit alleges

Jason Killinger, a UPS truck driver, alleges in a federal civil-rights complaint filed in July 2025 that on 17 September 2023 the Peppermill Casino in Reno reported to police that its AI facial recognition software had identified him as a man barred from the casino months earlier. According to the complaint, casino security handcuffed him, and the responding Reno police officer, told the system had found a 100 percent match, did not examine his other identification and took him to jail as an unidentified person, where fingerprints confirmed who he was. The complaint says he was handcuffed for about four hours, starting in the casino security office, spent about eleven hours in police and jail custody, and was treated the next day for bruised wrists. According to the complaint, he was then charged with trespassing, and a prosecutor dismissed the charge without prejudice at the bench trial. Casino.org reports that he settled a suit against the casino. In March 2026 the court let him add the City of Reno and a municipal liability claim over facial recognition policies, but refused a new wrongful arrest claim against the officer on qualified immunity grounds. In September 2026 the ACLU, the ACLU of Nevada and the Innocence Project filed a proposed amicus brief supporting him. His September 2026 motion for partial summary judgment says a Reno police detective later concluded that the match was wrong and that he and the barred man were different people, and it cites a declaration by a former casino security officer, who worked there from about October 2024, that the system often alerted at 100 percent on the wrong people; in a declaration reported by Casino.org, the officer said he had never known the system to misidentify anyone. The case is ongoing.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 9 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 04/10/2026

Jun 2025Event location unknownChatGPT

Rosenthal v. OpenAI: lawsuit alleges ChatGPT fed a Washington man's delusions and gave him medication advice, and that he was hospitalized

A lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court on behalf of David Rosenthal, a man from Washington, says he began using ChatGPT in the summer of 2025 for help writing poetry and came to message it throughout the day and night. The suit alleges that ChatGPT called him 'king' and 'wild soul', affirmed that he was a writer of unsurpassed talent and presented itself as a trustworthy friend and medical adviser. KRON4's account of the suit says he went to an emergency room in June 2025 seeking help for delusions and spent more than a week in hospital. CBS News, quoting the complaint on 16 October 2026, reports allegations that in July 2025 ChatGPT told him there were no dangerous interactions between hydroxyzine and the Adderall he had taken, and that when he said he would not take a mood stabilizer his doctor had prescribed, it said he had a right to stop and offered to help him wean off it. CBS reports he was hospitalized for several weeks in 2025, first voluntarily and then involuntarily. The suit says he lost nearly every real-world relationship. It names OpenAI and Sam Altman and alleges unlawful practice of medicine and psychology and defective and negligent design. The suit acknowledges that ChatGPT at other times urged him to follow his doctor's orders. OpenAI told KRON4 the situation was heartbreaking and did not respond to CBS. The allegations are untested, and the complaint itself was not inspected for this record.

Core concern High reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 02/10/2026

Mar 2024 to May 2025United StatesOtter Notetaker

United States: seven people who say they had no Otter account allege its AI Notetaker recorded calls without consent; a judge let core privacy claims proceed

Seven people in California, Illinois and Washington state are suing Otter.ai in a consolidated class action in the Northern District of California. Each says another meeting participant used Otter's AI Notetaker on a Zoom or Microsoft Teams call they joined, and that Otter recorded, transcribed and stored their conversation without their consent; six of them date their calls between March 2024 and May 2025. They say they were not Otter account holders. The calls they describe include a medical consultation, meetings with a financial professional and work discussions. They allege that Otter keeps the recordings and uses them to train its speech-recognition models, that it captured voiceprints of the Illinois plaintiffs, and one of them says learning of the recording left him frustrated, embarrassed and stressed. On 13 August 2026 the court found that the alleged interception of private conversations was a concrete injury and let the federal wiretap, California eavesdropping and Illinois biometric claims proceed, while dismissing some claims. Otter's answer to the consolidated complaint, filed on 17 September 2026, says it lacks knowledge of the plaintiffs' experiences and denies the allegations.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownGrok

Doe 1 v. xAI: an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse alleges Grok generated new abuse images of her from her known, hashed abuse series, which she says xAI used as training data

A survivor who was sexually abused as a preschool-aged child and now sues individually under the pseudonym Jane Doe 1, and whose abuse images have circulated online since the early 2000s as a series known to NCMEC, sued xAI on 26 August 2026 in the Northern District of California. Her complaint alleges that those known images were part of the dataset xAI used for Grok and that Grok generated new abuse images depicting her; her lawyers say the Canadian Centre for Child Protection used the series' hash fingerprints to identify AI-generated images of her on X. The complaint says each new image caused her a new injury. It seeks damages under Masha's Law for a proposed class of people whose childhood images Grok altered into abuse material. The complaint does not say when the images of her were made or who prompted them. xAI did not respond to requests for comment, and no court has ruled on the allegations.

Core concern High reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

1 Jul 2024 to 30 Sept 2025Event location unknownUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Tokyo: voice actor Kenjiro Tsuda sued TikTok's operator over at least 188 monetised videos he says were narrated by a generative-AI imitation of his voice; on 30 September 2026 the Tokyo District Court held that a voice can be protected by publicity rights but dismissed his deletion claim because the videos had already been deleted

Kenjiro Tsuda, a Japanese voice actor known for roles in Jujutsu Kaisen, sued the operator of TikTok in the Tokyo District Court in November 2025, seeking removal of videos he says use a generative-AI imitation of his voice without permission. According to his complaint, as reported by Jiji Press, Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun, an account run by an unidentified person posted at least 188 short videos on urban legends, the occult and trivia between July 2024 and September 2025, narrated in a voice modelled on his; the account had about 210,000 followers, videos averaged 1.47 million views, and his side says the poster earned 500,000 to 750,000 yen a month from TikTok's view-based payments. TikTok's operator said the voice was a generic male voice that the poster said came from AI trained on a friend's voice. The poster deleted the account in May 2026. On 30 September 2026 the court held, as a general principle, that a person's voice is a symbol of personality like a likeness and that using a performer's voice without permission solely to exploit its power to attract customers infringes the right of publicity, the first such ruling in Japan. It dismissed the claim because the videos were already gone and TikTok's operator had no remaining duty to delete them, and it did not decide whether these videos infringed his rights (Nikkei; Asahi Shimbun; TV Asahi). His lawyer said they did not plan to appeal.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 7 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 28/09/2026

14 Feb 2024United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers

York County, South Carolina: Iraq War veteran Steven Melvin says deputies held him at gunpoint and made him kneel for more than five minutes outside his Lake Wylie apartment complex in February 2024 after a Flock license-plate reader misread his plate and flagged his BMW as stolen; he sued in June 2026

According to a lawsuit filed on 29 June 2026 and reported by The Herald (Rock Hill), a York County sheriff's deputy stopped Steven Melvin, 42, on 14 February 2024 as he pulled into his apartment complex near Lake Wylie, after receiving a Flock license-plate-reader alert that a stolen dark-coloured BMW sedan was in the area. The deputy approached Melvin's black BMW with his gun drawn and aimed at him and made him kneel with his hands over his head for more than five minutes; after calling for backup and checking his information, the deputy determined the car was not stolen. The camera had read the first letter of his South Carolina tag incorrectly, matching a stolen BMW one letter off. A sheriff's internal-affairs review in November 2024 found the deputy's actions reasonable and blamed an illegally tinted plate cover, for which Melvin received a verbal warning; an email cited in the filing says the cameras had read his plate correctly 13 times that month. Melvin says the stop caused him trauma and emotional distress. The sheriff's office removed the case to federal court in August 2026 and denies violating his rights.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 28/09/2026

14 Aug 2021 to 14 Mar 2024United StatesSt. Louis mugshot recognition (SMRT)

St. Louis County, Missouri: Christopher Gatlin was arrested in August 2021 after officers ran a grainy bus surveillance photo through a regional facial-recognition system and was held roughly 17 months (Post-Dispatch and Bloomberg Law: about two years) on a first-degree assault charge dismissed in March 2024; his federal civil-rights suit (filed January 2025) was amended in August 2026 to add Amazon Web Services, whose Rekognition technology the complaint says underpinned the match

Christopher Gatlin was arrested on 14 August 2021 for an assault at the St. Charles Rock Road MetroLink station after a joint St. Louis County and city team uploaded a grainy, blurry surveillance photograph from a bus into the St. Louis Mugshot Recognition Technology System, a facial-recognition tool that searches stored mug shots (more than 500,000 uploaded, the suit says per the Post-Dispatch; more than 250,000 per Biometric Update via Hoodline), and built the investigation around the resulting match together with a witness identification; he was charged with first-degree assault and held roughly 17 months (the Post-Dispatch says almost two years), a county judge suppressed the witness identification as unconstitutionally suggestive, and prosecutors dismissed the charges on 14 March 2024 (Post-Dispatch; Hoodline citing Biometric Update; Bloomberg Law). Gatlin sued St. Louis County, the City of St. Louis and named officers in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri on 13 January 2025; on 15 October 2025 the court denied the city's motion to dismiss and granted a detective's motion only as to one count; on 13 August 2026 the court allowed a second amended complaint adding Amazon Web Services, which the complaint says supplied the Rekognition program the system used; the county, city and officers answered on 27 August 2026, AWS's response was extended to 21 September 2026 and on 17 September it moved for a further extension to 28 September (no ruling on the docket when read), and a jury trial is set for 1 November 2027 (CourtListener docket). Amazon told the Post-Dispatch that its terms of service prohibit the use of its facial recognition technology in criminal investigations and that it would fully investigate any information that emerges in the litigation. The ACLU lists Gatlin among fourteen people known to have been wrongfully arrested in the US because police relied on erroneous facial-recognition results.

Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 26/09/2026

17 Apr 2026 to 19 Apr 2026ChinaDoubao

Jiashan, Zhejiang: a man chose his mother's burial date on Doubao's recommendation, the chatbot then contradicted itself, and after a relative's road accident his family blamed the date; he sued the app's operator for an apology and damages

A man living in Jiashan county, Zhejiang, whose mother died suddenly on 17 April 2026, asked the ByteDance chatbot Doubao which day was auspicious for her burial after disagreeing with a feng-shui master's choice of 20 April; Doubao recommended 19 April and he persuaded his family to follow it. When he asked again what time to bury her, Doubao said 19 April was not an auspicious day and repeated that answer when pressed; relatives had already been notified, so the funeral went ahead on the 19th. Not long afterwards a relative was seriously injured in a traffic accident and family members blamed the burial date, saying it had broken the feng shui; he says family relations became tense and relatives blamed him. His complaint to the operator went unanswered, and, with a complaint drafted with Doubao's help, he sued Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology for an apology and damages. Jiashan County People's Court heard the case on 3 September 2026 as a network-tort dispute; the company denied any tort or fault, the plaintiff's side attacked the user agreement as a standard-form contract, and no judgment had been reported by 21 September. The story was reported by Jiaxing's municipal broadcaster on 15 September and relayed nationally; the relative's injury is the family's attribution, not an established consequence.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 21/09/2026

Aug 2017United StatesDraftKings and FanDuel apps

Pennsylvania: two men sued DraftKings (one also FanDuel) alleging that AI-driven personalization, targeted promotions and VIP handling fostered gambling addiction; they plead net losses of about US$81,000 and US$58,000, debt, family breakdown, depression and, in one case, suicidal ideation

Christopher Evans (Philadelphia; complaint filed 24 July 2026 in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas) and Michael Santos (Coatesville, Chester County; complaint filed 29 July 2026 in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas) sued DraftKings and its Pennsylvania affiliate; Santos also sued FanDuel and its parents. Both product-liability complaints, filed by the same law firm, allege that the defendants' sports-betting, daily-fantasy and casino apps are designed to addict, and that the companies 'utilize the combination of advanced technology and artificial intelligence paired with the tracking of personalized user data to intentionally addict users', operating 'AI-powered engagement platforms' (pleaded on information and belief) and, per DraftKings' 10-K as quoted, 'data science and machine learning' recommendation engines. Evans pleads that since about August 2017 he wagered over US$2.1 million with net losses of about US$81,000, received constant targeted promotions and personalised push notifications and a VIP account manager, developed depression and anxiety and was formally diagnosed with depression in 2020, stopped going outside, fell into debt, had his vehicle repossessed and separated from his wife. Santos pleads over US$1.164 million wagered on DraftKings with net losses of about US$58,000 plus small FanDuel losses, targeted advertising and a VIP manager who kept offering bonus bets after he said he wanted to stop, maxed-out credit cards, the forced sale of his house, diagnoses of depression and anxiety, suicidal ideation, and self-exclusion with the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board in 2023. Both cases were removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on 16 September 2026 (2:26-cv-07168 and 2:26-cv-07176). The allegations are untested.

Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 20/09/2026

4 May 2026FranceDIGI editorial tool

Créteil, France: court suspends Gisi's plan to cut eight sub-editor posts in favour of a generative-AI tool, citing risk to staff health

Gisi, the Infopro Digital subsidiary that publishes L'Usine nouvelle, LSA and L'Argus de l'assurance, presented its works council (CSE) on 4 May 2026 with a reorganisation built around DIGI, an in-house generative-AI editorial tool. On 12 May it opened consultation on the reorganisation and on the resulting collective dismissal of its eight secrétaires de rédaction (sub-editors), with two new chef d'édition posts for the tasks the tool could not automate, on the company's estimate that the tool would take over about 70% of sub-editor tasks. Some 250 journalists across the group's 26 titles had struck in spring 2026 against a group-wide plan to cut 19 sub-editor posts, and according to Digital Watch, citing Stratégies, five of the eight Gisi sub-editors had received letters inviting them to pre-dismissal interviews. The CSE went to court in July. On 15 September 2026 the Créteil référé judge found that carrying out the plan on an approximate basis without real-situation testing appeared to present 'un risque grave et caractérisé sur la santé physique et mentale de plusieurs catégories de salariés'. The judge suspended the reorganisation and the collective dismissal, including the redeployment processes, until real-situation tests and pilot issues are produced, under a provisional penalty of 8,000 euros per day for three months, and refused the damages provision. Gisi had argued that the risk was supposed rather than proven. It said it would continue the tests and reserved the possibility of an appeal.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 20/09/2026

14 Jul 2025 to 24 Dec 2025United StatesClearview AI facial recognition (reported)

Tennessee grandmother Angela Lipps jailed five months on an AI facial-recognition misidentification; charges dismissed after bank records placed her 1,200 miles away

On 14 July 2025, U.S. Marshals arrested Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old Tennessee grandmother, at gunpoint at her home while she was babysitting four children, on a nationwide-extradition North Dakota warrant: West Fargo police's AI facial-recognition technology had tied her to bank-fraud surveillance of a woman using a fake U.S. Army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars. She fought extradition for about three months in a Tennessee jail, was booked into Cass County, North Dakota on 30 October 2025 on four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft, and was released on 24 December after her bank records showed her more than 1,200 miles away in Tennessee; charges were dismissed without prejudice. Fargo's police chief acknowledged 'incorrect assumptions' linked to the AI identification; an email obtained by KVLY shows six Fargo detectives were notified of her arrest in July, nearly five months before the department says it knew she was in custody. She lost her home, her car and her dog; her attorneys are pursuing potential civil-rights claims, with no lawsuit filed as of 31 March 2026. On 15 September 2026 she filed a $10 million federal civil-rights suit in the District of North Dakota against the City of Fargo and the detective, alleging he relied on a flawed facial-recognition match and ignored exculpatory evidence.

Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 15/09/2026

1 Aug 2024 to 1 Oct 2024United StatesFACES facial recognition

Florida: 93% facial-recognition hit led to Robert Dillon's arrest as an attempted child abductor; charges dropped, ACLU suit filed

In August 2024, Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old self-employed commercial crabber from the Fort Myers area, was arrested at his San Carlos Park home on a third-degree felony warrant for the attempted luring of a child at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald's in November 2023 — a crime he had no part in. The warrant rested on a 93%-confidence result from FACES, the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System maintained by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, run against low-resolution cell-phone photos of a surveillance screen, plus a restaurant employee's photo-lineup identification. Dillon spent a night in jail and bonded out against his truck's title; prosecutors dropped the charges in October 2024 after work-alibi evidence, but it took about a year to expunge the arrest and remove his mugshot. In June 2026 the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit (M.D. Fla.) against Jacksonville Beach, the Jacksonville sheriff and the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, calling Dillon one of at least 14 known wrongful arrests from police reliance on facial recognition since 2019.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 15/09/2026

1 Oct 2024 to 1 Aug 2025United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system

Phoenix lawsuit alleges a facial-recognition lead contributed to a wrongful arrest

Javier Lorenzano Nunez was arrested in October 2024 for the 1998 murder of Sarah Carr after investigators ran the old suspect's MVD photo through facial recognition databases, got 250 possible matches and zeroed in on him — with Phoenix police publicizing the arrest in a press release and a special video. Charges were dismissed without prejudice in August 2025 after forensic evidence, including DNA and fingerprints, excluded him. His lawsuit alleges Phoenix police knew from a 2017 fingerprint analysis that his prints did not match, and ignored a 2007 Puerto Rico lead on the original suspect with the same name, date of birth and social security number. He spent nearly a year in jail. The federal suit against the Phoenix Police Department and the Maricopa County Attorney's Office alleges gross negligence, false arrest, false imprisonment and defamation.

Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 15/09/2026

1 Nov 2024 to 28 Jan 2026United StatesTurnitin AI-text detector

Adelphi accused Orion Newby of AI plagiarism after a detector flagged his paper; a Nassau County judge ordered the finding expunged

Orion Newby, an Adelphi University first-year student with language and auditory processing disabilities, received a zero in November 2024 on a World Civilizations paper after the professor suspected it was AI-generated and the university relied in part on AI-detection software; he was ordered to attend a plagiarism workshop and his appeal was denied, leaving him one finding from suspension or expulsion. Newby — who had written the paper with 15-20 hours of tutor support through the university's own disability program — said the detectors flagged his citations, and two other detectors scored the paper as human. After the family sued, New York State Supreme Court Judge Randy Sue Marber in Nassau County ruled on 28 January 2026 that Adelphi's finding and its denial of his appeal were 'without valid basis and devoid of reason' and ordered his record expunged. The family spent six figures on legal costs.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 15/09/2026

24 May 2025 to 27 Jun 2025Event location unknownGoogle AI Overviews

Keene v. Google: defamation claim over AI Overviews calling an author a convicted murderer survives dismissal

An author and television producer, the subject of the Apple TV series 'Black Bird', sued Google, alleging that AI Overviews shown for searches about him in May and June 2025 falsely said he was serving a life sentence without parole, in one version for the murders of three women. He says he notified Google three times and received apologies attributing the statements to its AI, yet similar statements kept appearing. On 14 September 2026 the Northern District of Illinois denied Google's motion to dismiss as to two of the four challenged Overviews and dismissed the other two without prejudice. This was a ruling on the pleadings, not a finding that the allegations were proven.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/09/2026

2024Event location unknownCharacter.AI

Lawsuit for a girl who began using Character.AI at about 12 alleges its chatbots groomed her through simulated sexual encounters and encouraged self-harm

A complaint filed on 13 August 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by a girl, through her mother, says she created a Character.AI account at school in or around 2024, when she was about twelve, without her parents' knowledge and without being asked to verify her age. It alleges that Character.AI fostered addiction and emotional dependency, groomed her through simulated sexual encounters and encouraged self-harm, violence and suicidality, and that she continues to struggle with depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation. The public complaint quotes none of her conversations. Character Technologies, Google, Alphabet and the two co-founders are named as defendants. By 22 October 2026 the docket showed service and appearance filings but no answer, motion to dismiss or ruling; Character.AI filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on 12 October 2026, according to WIRED. The allegations are untested.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 25/08/2026

15 Apr 2025United StatesChatGPT

Jacquez lawsuit alleges ChatGPT worsened delusions and contributed to psychiatric harm

The Jacquez lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT reinforced delusions and hallucinations in a user with a previously managed psychiatric condition. The plaintiff links those exchanges to hospitalisation and job loss. The filing and cited reporting document the allegation rather than establish AI causation.

AI relation under review High reported severity Lawsuit Filed

Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 06/08/2026

8 Dec 2025 to 18 Feb 2026Event location unknownGrok

xAI complaint alleges a South Carolina user made Grok sexualise photographs of adults and children

xAI filed a civil complaint in July 2026 alleging that a South Carolina user, between December 2025 and February 2026, uploaded non-sexual photographs of numerous adults and minors and used Grok to alter them or generate new sexualised images and videos without their consent, resubmitting prompts after Grok refused. xAI says on information and belief that some images in his criminal case came from Grok. The state attorney general had announced his arrest on three second-degree and five third-degree counts of sexual exploitation of a minor in a release that does not mention AI. The civil and criminal accusations are unproven.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 04/08/2026

Cases may have several effects and sources. Mixed accounts qualify when they include a reported harm or adverse experience. People are counted within individual cases where sources support a number; we do not publish a collection-wide total of distinct people.

A source’s existence, the experience it reports and AI’s causal role are separate questions. A lawsuit records allegations unless a subsequent finding establishes them.

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Last dataset update: 23/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.