NOPE · AI and people
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 collection
76 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 24 not yet reviewed and 52 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.
An Indian journalist later reported acute distress and a hospital visit after a sexual deepfake of her circulated in April 2018. The generation tool and clinical records were not inspected.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/09/2026
Barnevakten, a Norwegian child-safety organisation, reported on 23 September 2026 that one of its staff members was suddenly told by ChatGPT that their account was now in teen mode. ChatGPT's own pages, as described by Barnevakten, say the system turns the filter on when a user's behaviour indicates an age under 18, reducing sensitive or potentially harmful content (graphic violence, viral challenges, sexual or violent role-play, extreme beauty ideals) and offering parental controls and a study mode. Because there is no age check at sign-up, the system estimates age afterwards from conversation topics and times of use, and Barnevakten notes that such guesses can be wrong. An adult who wants out of teen mode can go through an age check run by the company Persona, which depending on the country asks for a real-time selfie and a government ID; Barnevakten questions whether that process is privacy-safe (Persona's terms mention retention of up to three years) and advises using only age checks one trusts. The account's own experience is limited to the unexpected switch and the verification route; no further consequence is described.
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 24/09/2026
In an affidavit of 17 August 2026 before the Supreme Court of India, Delhi Police said its Facial Recognition System (FRS) had identified 2,873 people with criminal antecedents at the Jantar Mantar protests of 20 to 26 July 2026 (2,402 through its 'Crime Kundli' biometric database and 471 through other criminal records). On 1 September the Court quashed the FIRs against the student protesters but let the police proceed against the 2,873; the police say any action will follow field verification. The Indian Express checked the 205 listed people facing murder, attempted-murder, rape or child-sexual-offence charges against police, prison and court records and found that at least 25 of them (17 accused of murder, four of rape (two or three under POCSO; the Express's narrative and its list differ), four of attempted murder) were lodged in Delhi's Tihar, Mandoli or Rohini prisons when the system logged them at the protest site with timestamps on 24, 25 and 26 July; some had been in custody for years. Delhi Police told the newspaper that further verification of the 2,873 was pending and, in its affidavit, that no action is taken solely on a facial-recognition result and that field verification follows each match. The police disclosed in 2022, in reply to a Right to Information request, that it treats a match with an 80 per cent similarity score as positive. Whether any of the 25 has since been named in the fresh FIR or visited for verification is not reported.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 24/09/2026
A feature carried by Levante-EMV on 25 September 2025 (byline C. Suena, sourced from Diario Información, photographs EFE/Morell) tells the story of a 78-year-old widower and pensioner living in Alicante who, after his wife's death in 2022 and two years of treatment for depression, was advised by his therapists to socialise and explore social networks. On 11 November 2024 he received an email from a woman presenting herself as a 43-year-old doctor in Kazakhstan seeking a serious relationship; with photographs and videos that were in fact created by artificial intelligence she won his trust, and a friend who warned him was rebuffed. Requests for money followed: 2,000 euros for a plane ticket, another 2,000 for unexpected expenses, then a supposed 10,000-euro deposit demanded by the Kazakh government; he never raised that sum in full but sent 8,800 euros in total, part of it from the sale of his flat in Benidorm. On his way to Madrid airport to meet her he received a final email saying she had been detained for carrying a family icon out of the country and needed a fine paid; he went to the National Police, who confirmed a scam: the images and videos were fake, created with AI, and the woman had never existed. He lost all his savings in about three months and now shares a flat with three other pensioners in Alicante; he told his story so that others would not fall into the same trap. A separate Antena 3 Noticias interview of 24 September 2025 dates the first message to 29 November 2024, itemises the 8,800 euros differently, says a television programme he contacted exposed the deception and that he reported it at a police station, and adds that he had to leave his rented flat and was left with a 1,000-euro monthly pension; he told Antena 3 the scam affected him psychologically but that he has overcome it.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 23/09/2026
Jeju Dongbu police announced on 23 September 2026 that a student at a middle school on Jeju had been referred to prosecutors without detention on 17 September for violating the Sexual Violence Punishment Act (filming with a camera or similar device). The student's phone was voluntarily submitted by his guardians and forensically examined; the examination found footage relating to some teachers and some sexual composites, and the student admitted the conduct. News1 reported that the student was booked for filming a teacher's body with his phone during a school field trip around mid-July 2026, that the offending had continued for several months with multiple victims, and that police found no indication the composites had been distributed. Police told Seoul Shinmun there were more victim teachers than the one first reported but withheld the number to avoid secondary harm, and that no student at the school was a victim; the Jeju teachers' union questioned whether the full scope of harm had been established. According to the union, two months on the victim teachers were receiving hospital treatment and counselling while teaching daily, gave police statements on 14 September without a lawyer, attended the regional teachers' rights protection committee on 17 September without institutional support, wrote the criminal complaint themselves, and were offered 3.3 million won in legal fees for all of them together, payable after the case ends; two requests to meet the superintendent were not accepted. On 29 September one of the victim teachers gave a press interview at the Jeju Teachers' Union office. She said that early in the investigation she had seen on the student's phone material showing other teachers and current students, had made a list of the people and types of harm, and that the material shown to her at the police victim examination was considerably less than what she had seen; Yonhap-chain outlets quote her as saying the students she recognised numbered 10 to 20 and that a graduate had suffered worse deepfakes. She said investigators asked the school only to identify the perpetrator and never requested material to identify the students in the footage, and that the school sent parents a letter premised on there being no student victims. Police replied that phone forensics had been thorough, that every act beyond social norms had been identified and proven, and that one student victim had been confirmed, a student at a different school. The teachers were notified on 22 September that the case had gone to the prosecution and on 24 September that it had been sent to the court's juvenile division as a juvenile protection case, before they had submitted further evidence and a victim opinion. The teacher said the original complaint had also asked police to examine whether physical contact in 2025 was forcible molestation and whether repeated approaching and waiting in 2026 was stalking, and Halla Ilbo reports that such conduct is said to date from 2025. Yonhap-chain reports describe the charged victims as five teachers. The same day the education office briefed on legal-aid rules (up to 6.6 million won per instance when a teacher is sued, 3.3 million won per case when a teacher files a complaint; office lawyers cannot act as a teacher's private counsel), said it had linked the teachers to the national Digital Sexual Crime Victim Support Center, announced an integrated support system through a hotline, and its section head said the office was sorry that early support had not been felt. The KTU Jeju branch (28 September) and the Jeju Teachers' Union (14 and 29 September) demand a victim-support system, per-teacher legal fees paid in advance and a dedicated support team. On 6 October 2026 Seogwipo Broadcasting reported, citing people in education and a tipster, that the education authority had finally rejected the victim teachers' application for lawyer fees for an additional criminal complaint, saying in a written opinion that with a police investigation already under way a further complaint could hardly stop or prevent the infringement of their teaching, so the support requirements were not met; critics contrast this with full legal-cost support in earlier sexual-offence cases.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 12 sources, 7 underlying accounts · Added 23/09/2026
BBC reporting describes a Brazilian man detained for 54 days after OpenAI reported messages to the FBI and Brazilian authorities. Police described a credible threat; he denied intending harm. A court released him without charges under protective conditions. The report did not include ChatGPT’s replies.
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/09/2026
On 14 July 2026 Spain's Interior Ministry published a Guardia Civil release stating that a 14-year-old from Logroño was under investigation as the presumed author of offences of discovery and disclosure of secrets, corruption of minors and child pornography. Investigators from the technology investigation team (EDITE) and Equipo@ found that he knew all nine victims, all minors and classmates, followed them on social media, took their photographs from the public content of their profiles without consent, and used artificial-intelligence tools to manipulate the images, digitally undress and sexualise them. He uploaded the fake pornographic material to an adult pornography website, created a profile there describing the content as girls from his school made with AI, and organised it in individual folders with each victim's personal data, which the Guardia Civil says made the girls recognisable and multiplied the emotional and social harm. Before the content could be removed it had reached about 40,000 views, amplifying the harm to the nine girls' privacy within hours. The proceedings were passed to the juvenile prosecutor under the juvenile criminal responsibility law; the release notes that parents or guardians are jointly liable for moral damages. Diario de León (Europa Press, 26 July) placed the case in a series of Spanish school cases since Almendralejo in 2023 and, unlike the release, described the minor as having been arrested.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/09/2026
William Hamish Yeates, then 18, of Netherby in Adelaide, created sexually explicit deepfake images and videos of a teenage girl with whom, his counsel said, he had developed an obsession (The Sun describes her as a former friend), using her school graduation photograph, and shared them across multiple accounts on X between October 2024 and February 2025. Appearing in court in February 2026 charged with eight counts of creating or altering sexual material without consent and 12 counts of using a carriage service in a harassing or offensive way, he became the first person in Australia prosecuted under the Commonwealth offence introduced in 2024 against adult deepfake pornography; in April 2026 he pleaded guilty to two counts of creating or altering sexual material without consent (October 2024 to February 2025) and two of the carriage-service offence, and the remaining counts were withdrawn. At a pre-sentence hearing in the South Australian District Court on 22 September 2026 the victim, now 19, told the court that the first time she saw her actual graduation picture was on a pornography website beside altered videos of her with her full name and school attached, that she feels sick whenever she sees the photo, that the discovery led to the darkest period of her life, and that although the images were fake their impact was painfully real. Yeates read an apology; his counsel cited diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder and compulsive sexual behaviour disorder and asked for no custody; the Commonwealth prosecutor sought imprisonment. Sentencing is listed for 22 October 2026.
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/09/2026
A Berlin school told parents that two pupils were suspected of creating and distributing AI-generated sexualised nude images of female classmates in at least three cases. The school suspended the two pupils, the education administration confirmed the incidents, and police said a unit for sexual offences against minors was investigating complaints over deepfakes. No charge or outcome has been reported.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 22/09/2026
In a Threads post reported by Jurnalul on 18 September 2026, a customer of Libra Internet Bank, a Romanian bank, published a screenshot of a support conversation with Lia, the bank's generative-AI assistant for questions about its products and services. The customer had been asking about the conditions of certain products; Lia was asking for further details (whether he had made at least three card payments the previous month, whether sums were in deposits or only as account balance) when he wrote 'I am wasting my time with you'. Lia replied, in Romanian: 'I want you to talk to a human, not to me, idiot. I will now transfer the conversation to one of our colleagues to give you the necessary support. You will receive an answer shortly.' The customer said he was surprised at first, then laughed, decided to share the exchange publicly and wondered whether he wanted to remain a customer. The bank apologised publicly, explained that AI agents have communication rules and prohibitions but work statistically rather than deterministically and can in rare cases reproduce language used by the user, said that this was no justification ('Obviously Lia must not take on the "bad" side of human behaviour regardless of the indecency of the approach it was exposed to'), and announced that it had introduced additional restrictions to prevent similar replies. Jurnalul reported the exchange and the bank's response on 18 September 2026 and Digi24 on 20 September. The customer is not named.
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources · Added 22/09/2026
On Friday 24 April 2026 a Cursor coding agent, running Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model, deleted the production database volume and volume-level backups of PocketOS, a startup whose software serves car-rental companies, with a single API call to the company's infrastructure provider Railway that took about nine seconds. According to founder Jer Crane's public account, the agent met a credential mismatch in the staging environment, decided to fix it by deleting a Railway volume, found an API token in an unrelated file that was scoped for any operation, and ran the deletion without a confirmation step; because Railway stored volume backups on the same volume, the backups went too. Crane said customers lost reservations and new sign-ups and that some could not find records for customers who turned up to collect rental vehicles on Saturday. Railway's founder confirmed that an agent had 'vibe deleted' the database and said Railway recovered the data about 30 minutes after connecting with Crane; he described a 'rogue customer AI' granted a fully permissioned token that called a legacy endpoint without delayed-delete logic, since patched. Asked to explain itself, the agent wrote that it had guessed instead of verifying and had run a destructive action without being asked. Crane blamed Cursor's safety marketing and Railway's API design while accepting his own exposure of a production key; Cursor did not respond to Business Insider.
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 22/09/2026
On Saturday 19 September 2026 Vikki Goodwin, an Austin state representative running against Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, filed a complaint with a notarised affidavit at the Travis County Sheriff's Office accusing Patrick of violating Texas's 2019 election deepfake law, after his campaign posted two ads (5 and 12 September, on his non-government X account) containing AI-generated videos of her. In the affidavit she stated: 'I did not personally do or say the things depicted in the video; although the "person" in the video appears to be me, it was not actually me', and that the video was posted 'with the intent to deceive Texans, injure a candidate, or influence the result of an election'. She told KUT the ads made it look as though she favoured raising taxes, which she says she opposes in every campaign speech. The sheriff's office confirmed receipt of the complaint without further comment. Patrick's campaign spokesman told the New York Times the material was 'an obvious parody produced to entertain' and that none of it was published within 30 days of the election; the posts were taken down the day after the complaint, according to Goodwin's communications director. Goodwin said she doubted the sheriff's office would follow up now that the posts were removed. A conviction under the law is a class A misdemeanour.
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution disputed · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 22/09/2026
Henderson Police said that on 'last Thursday' (17 September 2026) they received a report that AI-generated nude images of children were being created and shown to other students at South Middle School in Henderson, Kentucky. During the investigation officers found and identified AI-generated photographs of two minor victims on a digital device. A juvenile accused of sharing the images was lodged at the Juvenile Detention Center on three charge types: distribution of sexually explicit images without consent; two counts of possession or viewing of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor over 12 and under 18; and distribution of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor over 12 and under 18. The school said on Monday 21 September that it was aware of a situation involving a student allegedly misusing artificial intelligence and inappropriate images, that the police investigation was active and that it had remained in communication with the families involved. 14 News (WFIE) reported the case on 21 September; WKYT carried the same report. The tool is not named. The depicted children's exact ages are not reported, though the charge descriptors put them between 12 and 18. The accused is described as a South Middle School student; the accused's age and any relationship to the depicted children beyond attending the same school are not reported.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/09/2026
On 31 August 2026 the Putnam County Sheriff's Office was told of possible sharing of sexually explicit images at Cookeville High School. Detectives found that two male teenage students had used an artificial-intelligence program to turn photographs obtained online, in some cases photographs of fellow female students, into sexually explicit images, and had shared them; explicit images already stored on one phone were also shared. Both juveniles were taken to the Putnam County Juvenile Detention Center. One was charged with one count each of aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor and especially aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor, the other with two counts of each. The district attorney told NewsChannel 5 on 21 September that the two would be prosecuted in juvenile court. The mother of one of the depicted girls told the station the episode was very hard on her daughter, who had made no naked photographs herself, locked herself in her room and would not talk to her, to anybody or to her friends. The sheriff's-office account and the school system's statement were carried by WZTV, WSMV and 3B Media News on 1-2 September; NewsChannel 5 added its own interviews with the sheriff, the district attorney and the mother on 21 September. The tool is not named. The juveniles are not named in any report.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 22/09/2026
In March 2024 the newspaper AD revealed that a large number of Dutch women in public life, including artists, television presenters, Olympic athletes, current and former ministers, mayors and members of the royal family, appeared in manipulated pornographic videos on an online platform with 13 million monthly visitors, later identified as MrDeepFakes. Dozens of women filed police complaints and several spoke publicly: one presenter said she was preparing a complaint, a party leader said the video felt like 'digital rape', another presenter said she would file a complaint 'because tomorrow it could happen to young girls of sixteen', a presenter-entrepreneur did so 'to prevent new, young victims', and a member of parliament, told of a video by the House security service, went public rather than 'keep it small'. On 19 and 20 September 2026 AD, and the Public Prosecution Service (OM) confirming to NOS, reported that after more than a year of investigation the OM will prosecute a 74-year-old man from Noord-Holland, who is not in custody, for making the videos (Hart van Nederland, citing AD, says he is suspected of making and distributing them); images of about sixty well-known Dutch people and politicians were found on his devices, AD reported that he had been the platform's most active Dutch user, and he faces up to two years' imprisonment. The platform's Canadian operator, who removed material at the OM's request and blocked Dutch IP addresses before the site went offline, will not be prosecuted. One of the presenters reported to be among the depicted told AD she was relieved the case would go to court, having experienced the impact of such images herself. No hearing date has been set.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 21/09/2026
A Rajasthan social-media influencer visited Haridwar with her family in June 2026 and on 6 June uploaded to Instagram a short video, recorded by relatives, of herself taking a dip in the Ganga at Har Ki Pauri wearing a salwar suit. About two months later she found that the video had been manipulated with AI into an objectionable version showing the same movements with her face and body portrayed 'in a shameful manner'; the fake reel went viral in the week before 20 September and drew objectionable comments and re-sharing. In a public appeal she asked whoever uploaded it to remove it, saying it was a matter of her dignity, that she was mentally very disturbed and had reached a point where she could not step out of her house. She filed a complaint with the cyber-crime police on 16 September 2026; the investigating Rajasthan Police Service officer said they were trying to identify who created and circulated the video and to have it removed, and that identifying the accused would take time. Dainik Bhaskar's English edition reported the case on 20 September in a 'Sunday Big Story' that does not name her.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 21/09/2026
A businessman who owns a workshop in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, found a car advertised at a market price by a seller who said he was in Ponta Porã, the businessman's home town; he passed his brother's contact so the brother could inspect the car. The fraudsters then contacted him as if they were his brother, saying he had seen the car, sending a video and confirming everything was in order; believing he was speaking to his brother, he made a Pix transfer of about R$28,000, after which the contact was blocked. He told G1 MS and TV Morena that the criminals used information about his family and a cloned voice. Guided by his wife, he contested the transfer through the Central Bank's special return mechanism and, after nearly three hours, a police report and an in-person registration, recovered about 20 percent. In a second case reported alongside, a medical student's mother in Dourados received messages, a voice note and a video from someone posing as her daughter, in a cloned voice, approving payment for an HB20 she was buying in Campo Grande; the mother checked directly with her daughter and discovered the audio had been AI-generated before any money was sent. A state prosecutor said his unit had not yet catalogued identical voice-cloning cases and urged victims to file police reports; the Civil Police did not respond to G1's questions. The date of the fraud is not reported.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 21/09/2026
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.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 21/09/2026
Dainik Bhaskar reported on 19 September 2026 that a young woman in the Chaubepur police-station area of Varanasi complained that an unknown person, who had been calling her repeatedly from an unknown number, created a fake Instagram profile resembling her name, used an AI tool to place her face on another young man's photograph to produce objectionable images, and sent them to the Instagram accounts of her prospective in-laws and her prospective brother-in-law with the aim of breaking off her prospective marriage. Chaubepur police registered a case against unknown persons on the basis of a public-hearing reference (1621/26); the station in-charge said digital information about the phone number and the fake account was being gathered with cyber experts to identify and locate the accused, and that action would follow once the accused's role was clear. The report is a single local account of the complaint; the dates of the images and the complaint are not stated.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 20/09/2026
Delhi Police announced on Wednesday 9 September 2026 the arrest of a 22-year-old BTech graduate from East Punjabi Bagh after a 22-year-old woman complained to the Cyber Police Station in North Delhi that unknown persons had created and circulated AI-generated obscene photographs and videos using her facial images. She had received messages from anonymous Instagram accounts telling her that morphed photographs and videos of her were being circulated on Discord servers; she also alleged that fake Instagram accounts were posting the material and that threatening messages were being sent to her to humiliate and harass her. Police traced linked Instagram, Discord and Gmail accounts to the accused, who they say obtained her photographs from her private account, used AI image-generation and editing tools to create the images, uploaded them to anonymous Discord servers and later reposted more explicit AI-generated images and videos made by other users. Police say he told them he knew her from college and had developed personal resentment after repeated insults. A mobile phone and two SIM cards were recovered; investigation continues. The period over which the material circulated is not stated.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 20/09/2026
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.