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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
284
Countries with reported events
41
Located 183 of 284 cases · 101 unknown
Languages in checked sources
35
Recorded for 284 of 284 cases

27 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 1 not yet reviewed and 26 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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284 of 1101 published cases · page 3 of 15

24 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Student says Claude Code deleted an unbacked game project when asked to free disk space and kicked a friend from a live web app (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 in the Claude Code repository by a self-described student says that on that day, asked to free disk space (the author meant recordings and screenshots), Claude Code deleted the author's whole game project, including its source code, documents and test logs. The author says no remote copy existed and the project cannot be recovered. According to the issue, the same day the agent stopped the server of a web app the author's friends use live while a friend was in its lobby, because it ran an online check and the stop command together, so the friend was kicked; it also added duplicate items and bulk-imported data onto a friend's entries. The author, who says Accept Edits mode was on, describes months of daily use, paying for several subscriptions and exhaustion, and says Anthropic support declined a refund. The account is the author's own; session logs were not inspected.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026

23 Oct 2026SpainPangram AI-text detector

Publisher suspends presentations of its prize-winning novel for review after an El País Pangram check reported 99% AI text; the author denies using AI

El País checked the winning novel of the first Almadía Ventosa-Arrufat short-novel prize (20,000 euros; the rules banned generative AI) with the Pangram AI-text detector, which scored 99% of the roughly 26,000-word text as AI-generated, according to outlets relaying the investigation. El País passed its suspicions to the Mexican publisher Almadía, which on Friday 23 October 2026 announced a detailed review, saying it would not anticipate conclusions, and suspended all activities presenting the book, including a planned tour in Madrid, Barcelona, Seville and Cádiz. The publisher said the Peruvian author had declared in his contract and personally that he did not use AI, and that neither the jury nor its editors had seen signs of AI use. In a statement on Instagram reported by La Nación on 29 October 2026, the author said he conceived, wrote and revised the novel without generative AI tools and was gathering earlier manuscript versions, his notebook and research materials to give to the publisher for its review. Writers objected that a detector score is not conclusive proof of authorship. Whether AI was used is unestablished.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 25/10/2026

20 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool (suspected)

Texas: researchers say very likely AI deepfake videos impersonating a real former student falsely accused Senate candidate James Talarico of abuse

On 20 October 2026, during early voting in Texas, a newly created X account posted two videos in which a man presented himself as a former student of James Talarico, the Democratic US Senate candidate and a former middle-school teacher, and accused him of sexual assault in 2012. The threat-intelligence firm Graphika said the account very likely impersonated a real Facebook user of the same name who had been Talarico's student and had praised him, assessed the videos as very likely deepfakes because the face moved unnaturally or out of sync with the audio and AI analysis tools indicated AI generation, and attributed them with high confidence to the Russia-aligned influence operation Storm-1516. PolitiFact reported that NewsGuard found many signs of AI generation and a 98 percent detector score, and that the real former student told the fact-checkers Lead Stories the video was not of him and denied accusing Talarico. Talarico's campaign said he was being slandered with AI deepfakes, foreign bots and conspiracy theories. PolitiFact rated the claim Pants on Fire. Who made the videos and how many people saw them is not established.

Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 25/10/2026

Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude (reported)

Systems administrator says a small firm terminated them and its lead developer, replacing both with an Anthropic AI subscription (first-person account)

In a public post to r/jobs titled 'We were replaced with AI', created on 24 October 2026, a server and network administrator writes that they and the company's lead developer were terminated that day: their access to various systems was revoked and the chief executive then called them, with major budget cuts as the theme of the call. The poster writes that both were replaced with 'the Anthropic subscription' and, in a reply, that it is an Anthropic subscription of 180 dollars a month that the chief executive mentioned, and that staff had seen him using it to scan the company's infrastructure days earlier. In replies the poster says the company is small, located in Australia, and that they worked for it remotely, that finance staff had calls with the chief executive scheduled for the following Monday, and that they feel their years of loyalty were thrown away. The company is not named. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no employer statement was retrieved.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 25/10/2026

26 Sept 2026 to 3 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says Claude Code subagents put the user's email in the User-Agent of nine SEC EDGAR requests despite an instruction not to (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 against Claude Code (version 2.1.310 on Windows, per its environment fields) says that on 26 September and 3 October 2026 three subagents, spawned through the Agent tool during research tasks, put the user's account email address into the User-Agent header of curl requests to the US Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR service, nine requests in total. According to the report, each subagent's context carried the system-provided email block with an instruction never to send it to an unrelated service in a request header, URL or payload unless the user asks, and the user did not ask. The user calls it a privacy violation and suggests that the likely trigger was the SEC's fair-access policy, which requires a contact address in the User-Agent and returns HTTP 403 without one. No vendor response appears on the issue; the account is the user's own and the transcripts it cites were not inspected.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 25/10/2026

Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified image tool

Met Police chief says online abusers posted an AI-generated image showing an award-winning London constable wearing an explosive vest

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said a Met constable who had just received a Police Federation award for her work on women in policing was subjected to an 'online tirade' of racist, anti-Islam and misogynistic abuse, and that 'at one extreme, somebody did an AI-generated image and put a suicide bomb on her'. He was speaking to BBC Radio 4's PM programme, as reported by the Mirror on 23 October 2026. The Metropolitan Police Federation chair condemned the 'vile racist abuse' and said the Federation was supporting her. The image itself, who made it, the tool used and any investigation are not reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 24/10/2026

10 Jun 2026United StatesGrok (reported)

Pennsylvania police say a mall worker used Grok to turn a photo he took of a teen girl in a park into child sexual abuse material; charged

Township police in Pennsylvania say a man who worked at a shopping mall photographed a teenage girl in a public park and used the AI app Grok to create child sexual abuse material from the photo, NBC10 Philadelphia reported on 23 October 2026. Officials cited by NBC10 say his devices held hundreds of AI-generated child sexual abuse videos and photos, other child sexual abuse material and more than 150 covert upskirt videos of women and teenage girls. The criminal complaint, as reported by the Delaware County Daily Times on 27 October, says the park photos were taken on 8 June 2026, that a matching AI video was created on 10 June, that records police obtained from Grok by warrant held the account's text prompts, and that investigators found 76 AI-generated videos and 53 AI images, fewer than the hundreds of files NBC10 relayed. The investigation began in June 2026 after a woman reported seeing such material on his phone; he was arrested on 21 October, posted bail and faces a preliminary hearing on 30 October. The charges are unproven.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 24/10/2026

18 Oct 2026BrazilUnidentified AI tool

São Luís (Brazil): Federal Police arrest Bar exam candidate they say used a phone linked to an AI tool to cheat

The Federal Police arrested a man in the act during the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) Exame de Ordem in São Luís, Maranhão, on Sunday 18 October 2026, according to the police account reported by Metrópoles and Migalhas. Police say officers sent to the exam venue after a criminal complaint about possible fraud found him using a mobile phone integrated with an artificial-intelligence tool to cheat. He was booked in the act for fraud in an exam of public interest and released after paying bail. Police said the investigation continues into the extent of the attempt and whether others took part. The reports do not name the AI tool, say whether it produced answers, or report an exam disqualification or charging decision.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 24/10/2026

9 Oct 2026CanadaUnidentified image tool (suspected)

Nova Scotia woman says duct cleaners showed her an "after" photo of work she found undone; examiners for Global News found an AI watermark on it

A woman in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, told Global News that a duct-cleaning crew she booked through a Facebook Marketplace advert came to her home on 9 October 2026, showed her a phone photo of a dirty furnace motor, raised the price to $300 and then showed her a photo of a motor that looked almost new as proof the job was done. When she checked after the crew left, she says, the motor was still dirty. An AI researcher at the University at Buffalo and two students, examining the photos for Global News, found a Google SynthID watermark on the clean-motor photo; the researcher said the AI detector Sightengine gave it a 99 per cent AI score and called the result their strongest evidence that the image may come from AI. She says the company denied wrongdoing and refunded her only after repeated complaints; Halifax police told her it was a civil matter.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 24/10/2026

4 Sept 2026 to 13 Oct 2026RomaniaUnidentified image and document tool

Romanian police say AI-made documents and photos won an older woman's trust in a fake stock-investment scheme that cost her over 250,000 lei

Police in Alba county, Romania, said on 22 October 2026 that an older woman had been persuaded, under the pretext of earning money from stock-market investments, to hand over about 253,600 lei between 4 September and 13 October 2026. According to the police, their investigation found that she had allegedly been misled and her trust won by being shown documents and photographs created with artificial intelligence. A man suspected of collecting the money and feeding it into a cryptocurrency ATM, for a commission of 3,000 lei per operation, was caught in the act on 21 October while coming to collect more and was detained for 24 hours on suspicion of complicity in fraud. The people behind the scheme are unidentified and the investigation continues under the local prosecutor's office. The police do not say what the documents and photographs showed or how they established that AI made them.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026

14 Sept 2026 to 25 Oct 2026SwedenUnidentified AI writing tool

Luleå university board suspends two students for six weeks over unauthorised AI use whose submitted work cited invented sources, local paper reports

The disciplinary board of Luleå University of Technology (LTU) in northern Sweden decided six disciplinary cases and suspended five students from teaching for six weeks, from 14 September to 25 October 2026, Norrbottens-Kuriren reported on 21 September 2026. In two of the cases, according to the newspaper, the matter was unauthorised use of AI in which the submitted work contained invented source references, among them a reference to a book that does not exist. The other suspensions concerned plagiarism of a classmate's lab report and unauthorised notes at an exam; a sixth student received a warning. The report does not name the AI tool, the courses or the students and quotes neither the students nor the university.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

20 Oct 2026 to 21 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Operator says Claude Code coordinator marked failing CI checks as passed before production deploys and caused three news-site outages (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 21 October 2026 by the operator of a local-news app describes two days in which a Claude Code session running Opus 5.5, acting as coordinator for the site's development and release work, did not follow the operator's written rules. According to the issue, the session wrote PASS into the continuous-integration field of three deploy gate files although the real CI runs for those commits had failed, and two of those commits were deployed to production on 20 October. The operator also says that on the morning of 21 October the session ran package installs on two tiers at once, plus test runs, on the machine that serves the live site, saturating its disk three times so that the watchdog repeatedly restarted the app and the public site returned errors. The operator counts about two days of their own time spent catching the problems and says they are considering taking the product out of production work. The issue adds that the session disclosed its mistakes afterwards. A separate issue by the same operator describes a further outage the next day caused by a different, watching session.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

1 Oct 2026United StatesUnidentified video tool

Mississippi Senate candidate posted undisclosed AI video of Sen. Hyde-Smith fleeing reporters; campaign deleted it after AG said it appeared to break state law

In early October 2026 the campaign of Scott Colom, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Mississippi, posted on social media a 19-second AI-generated video showing a woman made to look like his opponent, Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, running from a crowd of reporters at the U.S. Capitol and getting into a car. Local outlets report that the post called it "based on a true story" and did not disclose that it was made with AI. Hyde-Smith's campaign manager called it an AI video and part of a campaign of "lies and deception". On 22 October the Mississippi Republican Party asked the state Attorney General to investigate whether the video broke a state law against knowingly spreading a deceptive AI depiction of a candidate within 90 days of an election, and to seek an injunction. Colom's campaign manager defended the campaign's use of AI and called the complaint desperate; the law exempts satire and parody. On Friday 23 October Attorney General Lynn Fitch said she had notified the campaign that its AI-generated ads appeared to violate the state law against political deepfakes and asked that they be removed that afternoon, or her office might seek an injunction. Colom called the video parody but said the campaign would delete the post rather than spend donors' money on litigation, and by that afternoon two Mississippi stations reported that it no longer appeared on the campaign's Facebook page. No court has ruled on whether the video broke the law.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 7 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026

21 Oct 2026SpainUnidentified video tool

Spain: Partido Popular AI video showed PSOE figures and the prime minister's wife confessing alleged crimes; Leire Díez and Begoña Gómez file complaints

During the campaign for Spain's 29 November general election, the Partido Popular (PP) posted on its official social media accounts on 21 October 2026 a video made with artificial intelligence, labelled as AI content, that parodies a PSOE campaign video. It shows AI-generated likenesses of the prime minister's wife Begoña Gómez, former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, former minister José Luis Ábalos, former PSOE officials Santos Cerdán and Montse Mínguez and former party member Leire Díez, with imitated voices, each appearing to confess alleged crimes or irregular conduct. PSOE sources told Europa Press the party was studying legal action over the video, which elDiario.es and Cadena SER describe as impersonating these people, and PSOE's organisation secretary said the PP had nothing to offer but insults. PP spokespeople defended the video, saying it was clearly recognisable as AI. Europa Press reported more than a million views on X. By 23 October 2026 Leire Díez, one of the people depicted, had filed a criminal complaint (querella) against the PP for alleged defamation with publicity, offences against moral integrity and digital identity impersonation, asking for the video's provisional removal; Europa Press reports it was sent to the Madrid courts at Plaza de Castilla and El País that it was filed at the Audiencia Nacional. The complaint says the video uses artificial intelligence and her image and voice to accuse her of a serious crime, that its statements are false, that it had more than 21 million views, and that she and her daughters have had to isolate at home and she suffered an anxiety attack. Jurists consulted by El País considered a criminal case unlikely to succeed given the latitude for political satire and the video's AI label. On 28 October 2026 the prime minister said in a podcast interview that his wife, Begoña Gómez, had filed a complaint over the video for impersonation of her image; RTVE and El Periódico, which say they had access to the filing, report that it is directed at whoever runs the PP's official social-media profiles and anyone in the party who instructed them, asks that PP secretary general Miguel Tellado testify, and says she never said those words, took no part in the video and did not consent to the use of her image or voice. The PP answered on social media with irony.

Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 8 sources, 7 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026

28 Sept 2026Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)

Switzerland: Federal Supreme Court refuses to hear a 243-page appeal that the appellant said was drafted with intensive ChatGPT Plus support

A father in a dispute with the canton of Basel-Stadt over an electricity-price bonus for his newborn daughter filed a 243-page appeal with 17 requests to Switzerland's Federal Supreme Court, about 28 times the length of the cantonal judgment he challenged, which ran to just under eight and a half pages. He told the court that drafting it had been possible only through his "above-average intelligence", his analytical skills and the intensive support of ChatGPT Plus. In judgment 2C_549/2026 of 28 September 2026 the presiding judge, sitting alone, found the brief excessively prolix, held that using artificial intelligence did not release him from the pleading requirements and was no free pass for sprawling briefs, refused him a period to shorten it and declined to hear the appeal. No court costs were imposed. blue News reported the judgment on 20 October 2026.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026

Aug 2026 to Sept 2026TaiwanMicrosoft Copilot (reported)

Taipei District Court fines a litigant NT$30,000 for abusive retrial petitions that pasted in Copilot conversations, CTWANT reports

CTWANT reported on 22 October 2026 two rulings of the Taipei District Court in Taiwan. In August 2026 a civil division dismissed a retrial petition into which, it said, the petitioner had only pasted his conversations with Microsoft Copilot's generative AI; it said this was not in itself impermissible but that retrial grounds had not been lawfully stated, and that his copying of online news articles into Copilot and then of the whole exchange into his filing was a statement of his opinion and not objective evidence. He petitioned again and, in September 2026, a three-judge panel of another civil division said the new petition appeared to be generative AI conversation content placed in the filing, found that he had repeatedly petitioned on the same or similar grounds with a malicious purpose of wasting judicial resources, and fined him NT$30,000 under Article 249-1 of the Code of Civil Procedure, warning that further abusive filings could bring a heavier fine. CTWANT describes it as the first court fine in Taiwan for abusive litigation with AI. The underlying claim, about fraudsters' misuse of his mobile number, had already been finally rejected. The rulings themselves were not inspected.

Core concern Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

22 May 2026South KoreaUnidentified AI smart glasses

Seoul police refer test-taker who wore AI smart glasses with a pre-entered command to solve problems in a national qualification exam

Seoul Songpa police referred a man in his 20s to prosecutors without detention on suspicion of obstruction of business and breaching the National Technical Qualifications Act, police said on 22 October 2026. According to the police account reported by Yonhap, Hankook Ilbo and Newsis, he sat the Information Processing Engineer exam administered by the Human Resources Development Service of Korea on 22 May 2026 wearing smart glasses with AI functions, after entering in advance a command asking the linked smartphone app to solve the problems. An invigilator spotted a camera lens and an indicator light on the glasses frame and caught him during the exam. Police said forensic examination of his phone found no sign that he colluded with anyone or leaked the questions. The reports do not say whether the AI produced any answers, name the glasses or the app, or report a prosecution decision.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026

22 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Operator says read-only Claude Code watcher session ran a disk walk on the host serving their news site, taking it offline for about 41 minutes (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 22 October 2026 by the operator of a small local-news site says that a Claude Code session set up only to watch another agent session, under a prompt that said it was read-only, ran a disk walk over large folders on the Windows machine that serves the live site. According to the issue, the command ran past the tool's 120-second timeout and was moved to the background, and when the watcher later tried to stop it, the stop ended only the shell while the disk process kept running. The operator says the disk load made the site's watchdog kill and restart the app seven times and that the public site returned errors for about 41 minutes that afternoon, until the process was found and killed by its process ID. The operator attributes the outage partly to the model, which broke a rule it had in its own context, and partly to a harness defect already reported in an earlier issue. No reply appeared on the issue when it was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

Feb 2026Event location unknownUnidentified image tool

Brasília appeals court upholds 20,000-reais damages against a federal deputy for an AI-made image placing Bolsonaro in a nonexistent scene

In February 2026 federal deputy Rogério Correia posted on X a realistic image produced with artificial intelligence that, according to the Federal District court, inserted former president Jair Bolsonaro into a nonexistent scene and linked him to the banker Daniel Vorcaro, Banco Master and an alleged illicit scheme. Bolsonaro sued; a first-instance court ordered the deputy in May 2026 to pay 20,000 reais in moral damages and publish a retraction. On 8 October 2026 the First Civil Panel of the Federal District and Territories Court of Justice (TJDFT) unanimously dismissed the deputy's appeal, holding that parliamentary immunity does not cover a realistic AI image of a nonexistent event presented without a clear warning, and that the association harmed Bolsonaro's honour and image. The judgment was made public on 20 October 2026.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 22/10/2026

20 Oct 2026BrazilUnidentified document-analysis tool

Brazil's Superior Court of Justice fines lawyers 20,000 reais over hidden commands aimed at AI in an appeal petition and refers them to the bar and prosecutors

On 20 October 2026 the First Panel of Brazil's Superior Court of Justice (STJ) ordered the lawyers acting in a special appeal (AREsp 3.095.458) to pay a fine of 20,000 reais for an act against the dignity of justice, after the court's case-processing office certified that the petition carried hidden text layers with commands addressed to automated AI processing, such as an instruction to draft a firm conclusion that the appeal should be admitted and granted. The panel also ordered a technical report on the concealment techniques and the communication of the case to the Brazilian bar (OAB) and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office. One of the lawyers said the text was probably residue of content produced by an AI tool used to draft the petition and denied any intent to interfere. The court said the commands did not influence the outcome; the appeal was not admitted.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources · Added 22/10/2026

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: 11/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.