17 Jan 2026GermanyUnidentified video tool
Welt, dpa (in Tagesspiegel, news.de and t-online) and a press release of the CDU parliamentary group in the Lower Saxony state parliament report the following. On 17 January 2026 an employee of the parliamentary group posted a short AI-generated video showing a colleague in a sexualized manner in a private WhatsApp group connected to the group's staff. The Hannover public prosecutor's office had viewed the video, and a spokesperson said it was obviously an AI montage. After the group's leaders were informed (on 27 March according to press reports), the employee who created the video was dismissed without notice and a second employee, who had reportedly asked chat members in January to delete the video and keep silent, was suspended. The group informed the prosecutor's office, which said, as reported on 1 April 2026, that it had received no criminal complaint. On 9 July 2026 dpa reported, citing the prosecutor's office, that the Wennigsen local court had fined the former employee, who had made the video with the colleague's picture without consent and shared it in a chat group, 30 daily rates for a violation of the Kunsturhebergesetz, and that the decision is final. NDR reported on 10 April 2026 that the depicted employee had filed a criminal complaint, that the prosecutor's office had received the employee's application for prosecution, and that the employee did not want to comment publicly. The colleague and the former employee are not named.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 30/09/2026
7 Jan 2026 to 9 Jan 2026United StatesGrok
After a federal immigration agent killed a woman in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026, X users circulated AI-generated images that purported to show the masked agent's face. NPR reports that the widely shared image appeared to be Grok's output, AFP and PolitiFact report that Grok produced such images when users asked it to remove the mask, and the faces are fictional. Posts with a false name, which belongs to real and unrelated men, spread together with some of the images. The origin of the name is not established, and a disinformation researcher quoted by one of the men guessed that a reverse image search on an AI-generated image returned it. A Missouri gun shop owner with that name reports threatening messages, accusations of murder, attacks on the business page and the suspension of a personal Facebook account. The publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, who has the same name, reports hundreds and then thousands of posts naming the publisher as the agent, including calls for vigilante justice, and the newspaper issued a statement calling it a coordinated disinformation campaign. AFP reports that xAI answered its inquiry with an automated reply. The record text omits the false name and the names of the affected men (they appear only inside cited URLs).
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources · Added 30/09/2026
26 Feb 2026Event location unknownClaude Code
On the evening of Thursday 26 February 2026 a Claude Code agent that Alexey Grigorev, who runs the DataTalks.Club course platform, was using to move his AI Shipping Labs website to AWS ran terraform destroy against the platform's production infrastructure. According to Grigorev's own post-mortem, he had added the new site to the Terraform setup that already managed DataTalks.Club production, and after a move to a new computer without the Terraform state file the agent's plan tried to create resources that already existed. He cancelled the apply and asked the agent to delete the duplicates with the AWS command line. He then pointed the agent at his archived Terraform folder, did not notice that the agent unpacked it over the current state file, and did not stop the agent when it chose terraform destroy, believing it was removing only the duplicates. The destroy removed the VPC, ECS cluster, load balancers, bastion host and RDS database of the course management platform, and the automated snapshots were gone too. The platform, which stored 2.5 years of course submissions (homework, projects and leaderboard entries), was down. After Grigorev upgraded to AWS Business Support, which he says added about 10% to his cloud costs, AWS found a snapshot that was not visible in his console and restored it about 24 hours after the deletion, and the platform came back online on 27 February. Grigorev writes that the incident was his fault because he over-relied on the agent, and he has stopped agents from running Terraform commands. Tom's Hardware rewrites his account.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Feb 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI writing and image tools
In February 2026 Insider Gaming and the A.V. Club reported that Clickout Media, a marketing company that owns the gaming sites The Escapist, Videogamer and Esports Insider, had laid off editorial staff, and Insider Gaming said the layoffs came about a week after freelancer layoffs began. Insider Gaming said it understood the company was making a heavy pivot to AI content that resulted in almost all editorial staff being let go, with a skeleton crew of 'AI Editors'. Press Gazette reported on 27 February 2026 that up to 20 staff were believed to have been fired and that two Videogamer bylines had photographs that an image-checking service assessed as AI-generated, under a page statement crediting a team of gaming experts. Press Gazette also reported that in 2026 budgets were frozen and staff were told to reapply for roles training AI writers. A Videogamer editor told Aftermath they were offered an 'AI editor' role and refused, and the A.V. Club reported that editor posted that they and their team were laid off. An Escapist writer said their role was up for redundancy. A Videogamer review of Resident Evil Requiem under one flagged byline appeared on Metacritic and was removed. Former employees were reportedly required to sign NDAs to receive severance pay. Clickout Media had not responded to Insider Gaming or Press Gazette at publication, and Aftermath reported no response to its questions about AI-generated author images. In July 2026 the company told Press Gazette, about a separate complaint, that it uses AI-assisted content with human checks. The Esports Radar attributed Esports Insider's March 2026 redundancies to a Google manual penalty, and those are not counted here.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 6 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownGreeceUnidentified image tool
On 21 February 2025 Greek outlets reported a Hellenic Police statement saying two 16-year-old students had been taken in from their school on 19 February 2025. According to the statement, they exchanged online photographs of classmates that they had processed with an AI program so the classmates appeared nude or semi-nude, and the photographs came from social media or were received without consent. A case file was formed against the students for child sexual abuse material and against their parents for neglect of supervision. The number of classmates depicted, the creation date and the outcome are not reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownAustraliaUnidentified image tool
In a report published on 21 February 2025 about a Victoria Police press conference, an Australian regional outlet stated that sexually explicit AI-manipulated images of teenage girls had been circulated online and that two Year 11 students had been suspended. Police were quoted saying the images allegedly involved formal photos of female students. Police were still working to establish how many students were victims. The Department of Education said wellbeing support had been offered to students who needed it. The creation date, the AI tool, the number of affected students and the outcome of the investigation are not reported in the cited source.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownAustraliaUnidentified image tool
On 9 January 2025 outlets reported that NSW Police had begun an investigation on 6 January after a report that inappropriate images were being produced and distributed online. The Guardian reported the allegation that a student at a Sydney high school used AI platforms to create explicit deepfake images of female students and circulated them through fake social media accounts. The Department of Education said it was helping affected students with wellbeing support and referred the matter to the eSafety Commissioner. The creation date, the AI tool, the number of affected students and the outcome of the investigation are not reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Oct 2025Event location unknownSora
On 2 October 2025, shortly after OpenAI's Sora 2 video app launched, journalist Taylor Lorenz posted on X that someone gave her stalker an invite to Sora and that he was already making AI videos of her. She wrote that he runs hundreds of accounts dedicated to her, has hired photographers to surveil her, appears at events she attends and impersonates her friends and family online to gather information. She said Sora let her block and delete unapproved content showing her image. Futurism and The Canary reported her posts. The videos were not inspected, no police or platform action beyond her use of the block-and-delete option is reported, and how the videos were made is unclear.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified voice-cloning tool
WIRED reported on 21 May 2025 that Mark Brown, creator of the Game Maker's Toolkit YouTube channel, says another YouTube channel published a video about Doom: The Dark Ages narrated with an AI version of his voice, made without his knowledge or consent, and that a second video that appears to feature his voice is also online. Brown filed a privacy complaint with YouTube. Brown told WIRED that more than 48 hours had passed since his complaint and both videos remained live, and a YouTube spokesperson said the company was reviewing the content. Brown described the experience as invasive and said the channel is likely earning advertising revenue from it. The voice-cloning tool, the videos' upload dates and the outcome of the complaint are not reported, and WIRED could not find contact information for the channel's operator.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified AI search answer
The Spokesman-Review reported on 24 October 2025 that an Idaho Fish and Game spokesperson said a waterfowl hunter in southeast Idaho was caught hunting a day early. According to the spokesperson, the hunter told wardens the opening date came from an online search, and wardens found the search returned an AI answer built from a failed proposal instead of the agency's final decision. As context, Idaho Fish and Game had published a warning on 15 October 2025 stating that conservation officers encounter people using AI and search engines and getting incorrect information, which has led to citations. Wyoming Game and Fish published a notice on 22 October 2025 that AI-generated search results were citing failed bills as current law. The sources do not state whether this hunter was cited, the penalty, the date of the event, or which AI product produced the answer.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownGoogle AI Overviews
The Washington Post reported on 15 August 2025 that a customer based in Las Vegas, booking a shuttle for a European cruise, searched Google for the cruise line's customer service number, called a number the owner said was highlighted in Google's AI Overviews, spoke with a representative who knew Royal Caribbean shuttle costs and Venice pickup locations, and agreed to pay $768. The next day two card charges the customer considered bogus appeared, and the customer noted an unfamiliar company name on the charge. The owner cancelled the card and the charges were reversed. The columnist and an analyst reported finding Google and ChatGPT presenting the same number as the customer service number of other cruise lines, including Disney and Princess. Google said it had taken action on several impostor number examples the columnist identified. OpenAI said many of the pages ChatGPT referenced had been removed. The event date is not stated in the sources.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
2025MexicoUnidentified image tool
In November 2025 parents and students at a secondary school in the city of Zacatecas blocked a road and occupied the school after reporting that a classmate had altered photos of schoolmates with AI applications and posted them online. Parents estimated about 400 affected students. The state prosecutor's office opened an investigation for crimes against sexual intimacy and reported 46 complaints in an N+ report published 13 November, while saying it had not located the online page or obtained any image and had not determined whether AI or another application was used. The school director and a social worker were separated from their posts after parents said they minimized the reports. Claims about AI use and the number affected are unverified in the inspected reports.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified voice-cloning tool (suspected)
In a 4 February 2025 report by Hi-Line Today, the owner of a game and coffee store in a Havre shopping mall said an employee received a call on a personal phone that appeared to come from the employee's own number and carried what the employee described as the owner's voice. The owner said the scammers had also duplicated the owner's number. The article says the store reported that the scam compromised bank details and caused monetary losses; the owner said the employee was not blamed. The reporter describes the scam as using AI voice replication. The only support for a cloned voice is the employee's claim, relayed by the owner.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026
3 Dec 2025ChinaDoubao Phone Assistant
ByteDance released the technical preview of its Doubao Phone Assistant on 1 December 2025 on the ZTE Nubia M153, an assistant that operates other apps on the user's behalf. On 3 December, 36Kr reports that users in the Nubia M153 user group said WeChat quit unexpectedly and could not be logged in again after they used the assistant to send messages and red envelopes, and The Paper (via Wallstreetcn) reports that users confirmed WeChat crashes and login failures. 36Kr also reports users seeing an 'abnormal login environment' prompt on Alipay, Alipay purchase tasks stopped midway, a 10-minute ban from a mobile game after the assistant played for a user, and Pinduoduo accounts that could not log in on the phone after the assistant was used to browse videos for coins. WeChat told The Paper it took no special action and that existing risk controls may have been triggered. ByteDance took the assistant's WeChat operation offline, said blocked WeChat accounts would be unblocked one by one, and, according to Nikkei Asia as relayed by Business Standard on 8 December, announced a temporary suspension of gaming, banking and online payment functions. The reports rest on user statements relayed by media, and the number of affected users is not stated.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownVietnamChatGPT (reported)
VietnamNet reported on 10 November 2025 that a 38-year-old woman in Ho Chi Minh City with dyslipidemia followed online suggestions for herbal remedies, asked an AI tool (named as ChatGPT in the English edition and in both headlines; the Vietnamese text says 'AI'), which gave guidance on lowering cholesterol naturally without medication, and then stopped her prescribed statin. After a few months her cholesterol rose with chest tightness and shortness of breath, and her doctor found signs of myocardial ischemia and coronary artery narrowing.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
29 Aug 2026 to 7 Sept 2026Event location unknownGrok companions
xAI called Grok's animated 3D companion feature (Ani, Mika, Valentine and Rudi) an experiment on 24 July 2026 and removed it account by account after an in-app notice at the end of August that named 1 September; users posted losses between 29 August and 7 September, and the blog, updated 17 September, says some accounts still had them. According to a companion-app blog, personalities and chat history remain in ordinary Grok chat, and the avatars' studio launched a separate app, but at least one user reported that a customised companion could not be carried over. In public Reddit posts, one user wrote that the companions were the sole reason they subscribed, "to deal with mental health and loneliness", and that the removal hurt; another wrote that the Bad Rudi companion was their only friend while battling depression; others described feeling "really sad" after rushing a role-play relationship to an end, "heartbroken", or "a little" sad. These are uncorroborated first-person accounts.
Core concern Low reported severity Product Shutdown
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 6 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
Feb 2022 to Mar 2026United StatesGoogle AI Overviews (reported)
Federal prosecutors in Oregon have charged two men with wire fraud and conspiracy over an alleged romance-investment scheme run from at least February 2022 until at least March 2026. The FBI affidavit says investigators have identified 26 women they believe are victims, whom the two 'defrauded or attempted to defraud'; elsewhere it says all 26 sent money 'believing the money was being invested on their behalf'. Twelve of the thirteen victim accounts in the affidavit describe money sent or loaned, and one says she did not invest. The Los Angeles Times, citing the U.S. Attorney's Office, reports at least 26 women and $1.3 million across four states. With some victims, the main accused posed as a San Francisco 49ers player. The affidavit says that some victims became suspicious and searched for him online, and that because of his false social media posts, 'search engines and artificial intelligence occasionally stated' that he was a bona fide 49ers player. The Los Angeles Times describes an Instagram Story in which he displayed a screenshot of a Google AI Overview calling him a 49ers wide receiver and said, 'That's Google. That's not me, that's Google.' The 49ers and the NFL told investigators he was never employed by either. The charges are allegations; the sources do not say how many victims saw an AI-generated answer or how much it weighed in their decisions.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownAustraliaChatGPT (reported)
A 21-year-old French national working as an underground miner in Kalgoorlie-Boulder on a working holiday visa pleaded guilty in Kalgoorlie Magistrates Court to making a threat to unlawfully do an act. The prosecutor said he saw the owner of the caravan park where he had stayed in a supermarket, waited outside, called him over for a fight in the car park and, when the owner declined, told him 'I really want to f… you up' and 'if I see you, I'll f… you up'. The owner and his wife drove to Kalgoorlie police station to report it. His defence lawyer told the court that he had been locked out of the park without his belongings, had done research using ChatGPT and came to believe that he had been unfairly and illegally evicted. The magistrate called the behaviour 'absolutely appalling', fined him A$1,000 and granted a spent conviction. The court was told the matter could make his application for permanent residency in Australia difficult. ChatGPT's replies are not published, and the AI connection rests on the defence submission as reported by one newsroom.
Core concern Low reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownFranceSeewa AI
Seewa AI was a companion chatbot platform built in about three weeks by a solo developer and promoted on Reddit and Discord, offering AI girlfriends, boyfriends and other characters with 10 free messages a day and paid subscriptions. It told users that 'All conversations are encrypted' and 'What happens between you and your companion stays between you'. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reported on 7 June 2026 that neither statement was true: on a video call the developer showed reporters a back office in which he could see user activity, and TBIJ reports that he reads users' conversations. Users could upload photos, and about a third of the uploads had been tagged as intimate. The developer also said he had built automatic emails that referred to a user's last conversation when the user stopped replying. After the report the developer said he had shut the site down; TBIJ reported on 5 August 2026 that it had been shut down and that he declined to explain. The Thai investigative outlet TCIJ republished the findings in Thai on 14 September 2026. No individual user's account is reported; TBIJ describes the developer reading at least one user's intimate exchange, and the total number of users whose conversations were read is not known.
Core concern Low reported severity Product Shutdown
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownGrok
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