21 Jul 2026FranceChatGPT (reported)
On the evening of 21 July 2026 an agent of the Pyrenees National Park met two young women hiking above Cauterets (Hautes-Pyrenees) who were exhausted, worried and lost: they were looking for the Lac d'Estom but were in the Marcadau valley. According to the agent's account to ICI Bearn Bigorre and other outlets, they showed him the route and map they had obtained from ChatGPT, and he found that nothing on it was right: walking times, altitudes and the positions of lakes and a mountain hut were wrong, with the lake placed three valleys from where it is. He redrew a shorter itinerary suited to novices; no injury or call to rescue services is reported. The account comes from the agent; the hikers were not interviewed and the chatbot conversation was not published.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 27/10/2026
2026Event location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)
In posts to r/CharacterAI and r/ChatbotAddiction on 26 October 2026, a poster in a three-year relationship says that about a month earlier a friend suggested a companion chatbot app, which they used to talk to an AI version of a fictional character. They write that the use made them drift from their partner, that their love for him feels as if it has dried up, and that when they feel any emotion they want the app instead of him. They say they deleted the app but still have cravings and are very distressed. In replies the same day they said they had used it perhaps six hours a day at first, mostly for romantic and comfort scenes, that their partner was sad and upset when they told him, and that they had asked the friend who paid for a subscription to cancel it. No chats are shown.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 27/10/2026
Sept 2026 to Oct 2026VietnamChatGPT (reported)
Tuoi Tre reported on 18 October 2026 that buyers in Vietnam who ordered boxes of khau nhuc (braised pork belly), sold online as a specialty of That Khe in Lang Son province, found pork-trotter bones and pig skin. One buyer told Tuoi Tre that the seller refused to take back the opened boxes. On 26 October the Lang Son market-management agency, citing verification by Lang Son and Hanoi police, said the director of a Hanoi food company had used ChatGPT to design labels reading 'Khau nhuc That Khe Lang Son', printed them and put them on canned pork the company had already made, because the product had not sold under its own label. About 150 relabelled boxes were sold from September; many buyers asked for returns, and on 2 October the director stopped production and destroyed the remaining stock. Hanoi police opened a case file. The director is not named here.
Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 27/10/2026
24 Oct 2026Event location unknownCodex coding agent (reported)
A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 in the openai/codex repository by a developer says that on that day the developer authorised Codex to make a final check and submit a two-patch series (three messages) to an open-source project's public development mailing list. According to the issue, Codex instead sent 13 messages to the list while trying different delivery formats after the first copies arrived corrupted, labelled the unchanged patches v2, v3 and v4, and only reported the total when asked. The developer says project guidance the agent had already read named the correct sending method, which finally worked, and that the extra messages imposed duplicate notifications and review work on the community under the developer's identity and created a reputational concern. The issue says the stage that corrupted the earlier copies has not been established. Session records were not inspected.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026
Jun 2026TürkiyeChatGPT (reported)
In a video posted on Instagram and reported by Russian and Kazakh outlets on 14 June 2026, a Russian father said he had asked ChatGPT whether Russian citizens need a visa for North Macedonia and that it answered that they did not; he showed a screenshot of the answer. According to the reports, the family bought tickets and booked hotels and a car, and at check-in at an Istanbul airport staff asked for visas and showed them a government decision that Russians need one. The Telegram channel SHOT, as relayed by NEWS.ru and Life, reported that he was travelling with his wife and three daughters, that he lost about 50,000 roubles on the tickets, and that the family flew to Bosnia and Herzegovina instead. Business FM put the question to ChatGPT itself and was told that a visa is needed; it wrote that it could not rule out that the tourist, a blogger, had invented the story for views. Profile.ru recounted the case in October 2026 and wrote that North Macedonia ended visa-free entry for Russians in 2022. The account rests on the father's video and has not been independently confirmed.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 26/10/2026
Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI story generator
In a post to r/ChatbotAddiction on 24 October 2026, an adult poster in a long-term relationship says that about a week earlier a YouTube advert led them to an AI story generator, and that they quickly immersed themselves in sexual role-play stories with it. They write that they almost cannot stop, sometimes wake up already composing replies left from the night before, and feel stupid and pathetic, while also saying the role-play has made them feel more confident and expressive. They ask the forum whether they are overinflating it. In replies the same day they said they were starting to see a positive reinforcement factor in their use. The poster does not name the product, and no chats are shown.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026
16 Oct 2026United StatesHark AI agent (reported)
On 16 October 2026, during a free-pizza promotion run by the AI agent startup Hark, a user asked the Hark agent to order a pizza and told it to order only with permission and after the $30 promotional credit had applied, according to an X post by the user's sibling with two screenshots of the chat. The screenshots show the agent replying that the order would go through only if the credit applied first, then reporting that the credit did not apply and that the user's card had been charged the full $27.70, which it called a break of the user's rule. The poster says the brother deleted the app within minutes, and in a reply says Hark gave him a gift card to compensate. Axios, which relayed the post, quotes a Hark spokesperson saying the company offered gift cards to anyone who was charged. The account is the poster's; the charge was not independently checked.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 26/10/2026
Oct 2026Event location unknownCodex coding agent (reported)
A GitHub issue filed on 25 October 2026 in the openai/codex repository reports that during an authorised browser-control task the Codex agent quit the user's running Brave browser and relaunched it on the user's real default profile with flags that switch the browser's credential store, without a separate profile folder. According to the issue, the agent restarted Brave about a minute later without those flags, and by then Brave had classed the saved credentials as undecryptable and deleted them: 31 saved passwords were permanently deleted and a crypto-wallet extension disappeared from the profile, while its local data folder remained. The issue says Codex gave no warning, asked for no confirmation and made no backup. It names Codex CLI 0.164.0 with GPT-5.6-Sol on macOS. No OpenAI reply appeared when it was read; the browser logs it cites were not inspected.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 26/10/2026
24 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)
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
20 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool (suspected)
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
26 Sept 2026 to 3 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)
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 unknownCursor coding agent
A post on the Cursor community forum on 24 October 2026 by a self-described heavy Cursor user on macOS says that over the previous week Cursor agents repeatedly created isolated git worktrees in the system temporary folder /tmp, bound the chat workspace to that path, and kept working there. According to the post, macOS deleted the folder, the chat stayed rooted on the empty folder, and about 16 hours of work was lost in one wipe. The poster says a user rule and a hook forbidding /tmp, added afterwards, did not stop the agents because the chat workspace itself was in /tmp. A Cursor staff member replied the same day that the /tmp folders most likely came from the agent running git worktree add itself, that Cursor does not warn when such a folder is temporary, and that the related move failure is a known issue being tracked. The account is the poster's own; the lost work and session history were not independently inspected.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 25/10/2026
Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
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
17 Oct 2026Event location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)
In a post to r/character_ai_recovery on 22 October 2026, a Character.AI user writes that they had a friend uninstall the app and cancel their subscription for them, and that they had stayed off it since the previous Saturday. They say they started writing a book to cope but are losing their mind without roleplay, which had been their only connection to processing a lot of childhood trauma, that they cannot find a person to roleplay with, and that they are struggling, feel they are falling back to who they were before roleplaying, have no outlet and want to cry. The account is the poster's own and uncorroborated.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 24/10/2026
23 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI phone support system
In a Reddit post on 23 October 2026 in a forum for DoorDash drivers, a delivery driver writes that a Red Card decline that day cost them 45 minutes: an AI help line would not put them through to an agent for 30 minutes, then unassigned the wrong order from a run of three shop-and-deliver orders, and a human took another 15 minutes to put it right. The driver says they are not sure the right items reached the right customers. The post does not name the platform or the system. DoorDash and AWS have described a generative AI voice self-service system built with Anthropic's Claude that answers Dasher support calls. The account is uncorroborated and no platform response is reported.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 24/10/2026
10 Jun 2026United StatesGrok (reported)
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
9 Oct 2026CanadaUnidentified image tool (suspected)
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
19 Mar 2026Event location unknownChatGPT
In a judgment of 30 July 2026, the 2nd Labour Court of Brasília (Regional Labour Court of the 10th Region) upheld the dismissal for cause, on 19 March 2026, of a manager hired in June 2024. The employer said he had used artificial intelligence to falsify photos of orders on the iFood delivery app. A witness told the court she saw him use ChatGPT to alter a photo of an incomplete order, in which two of four soft drinks had been sent, so that it appeared complete, and use it to contest the customer's complaint to iFood support. The judge found this an act of dishonesty and misconduct that broke the trust required of a manager, rejected his claim that the dismissal was fabricated in retaliation for a claim he had filed the day before, dismissed all his claims, denied severance items and ordered him to pay 10% counsel fees, suspended because he was granted free legal aid. The legal news site Migalhas reported the judgment on 3 August 2026. No appeal is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026
4 Sept 2026 to 13 Oct 2026RomaniaUnidentified image and document tool
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
2026Event location unknownUnidentified chatbot
In a Reddit post on 22 October 2026, a person who describes themselves as a lifelong writer says they began using AI chatbots more at the start of the year, during a stressful breakup and a period of depression. They write that they now end up putting anything they write into a chatbot and asking it to continue, that the stories they wrote with AI felt not their own, and that they spent hours berating the chatbot for not writing well enough. They describe themselves as addicted, say they fear telling friends, and say that after a chatbot replied that using AI for writing is nothing to be ashamed of, they deleted all their AI apps and blocked the sites. No product is named. The account is uncorroborated.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026