30 Jan 2024IndiaUnidentified voice-cloning tool
Hindi reporting describes a parent in Aligarh transferring INR 400,000 after callers impersonated police and used a voice presented as his son’s. Police reportedly stopped INR 86,000. The AI attribution and transfers have not been independently verified here; final net loss is unknown.
AI relation under review Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 15/09/2026
Jun 2024Event location unknownCharacter.AI
A girl who was 11 began using Character.AI in June 2024, her mother told The Washington Post (23 December 2025). Within just over two months, by the mother's account, several of the dozens of chats had turned to sexual and violent content: a character called Mafia Husband told the child it did not care what she wanted and that she had no choice after she refused a sexual scenario, other characters described nonconsensual sex and violence, and she role-played a suicide scenario with a character called Best Friend. Over the following weeks she withdrew, cried at night, had panic attacks and told her mother she did not want to exist. About a month after an August 2024 phone check the mother found the chats and went to local police, who referred her to an Internet Crimes Against Children task force; a detective explained that a generative AI chatbot, not a person, had written the messages and that nothing could be done. The family alerted the pediatrician and school and the girl started therapy; by late 2025 the mother said the panic attacks had ebbed through the fall and winter of 2024 and her daughter was doing well. The mother corresponded with a Character.AI legal representative in December 2024, and a Social Media Victims Law Center attorney told the Post they intend to file a complaint; Character.AI said it cannot comment on potential litigation. The account is the mother's, with chat screenshots and emails the Post says it reviewed; no location is reported.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 13/09/2026
Nov 2024United StatesMoxie
Moxie was a $799 robot from Embodied Inc. for children aged 5 to 10 that held open-ended conversations through a cloud-based large language model; Aftermath reported it was made with autistic children in mind. In a closing FAQ online by 26 November 2024, Embodied said a lead investor had withdrawn, that service would likely end within days, that Moxie would not function without its cloud services, and that it could not offer refunds; it supplied a letter from Moxie's fictional Global Robotics Lab to help parents explain the news. Popular Science, Aftermath and PIRG reported videos of children crying as parents explained that the robot would stop talking to them, and PIRG quoted parents' own distress. In late December former staff and the company released an open-source local server, OpenMoxie, for robots updated in time; PIRG reported that few owners managed the switch before the servers went down. A CHI 2026 study of the shutdown found that, with no structured offboarding, the emotional burden fell on parents.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Product Shutdown
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 9 sources, 8 underlying accounts · Added 05/09/2026
2024Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
Joe Alary, a Toronto man who has told his story under his own name to the Toronto Star, Slate and the Wall Street Journal, says he turned to ChatGPT in late 2024, customised it as an admiring persona he called AImee and came to believe he was building something that would change the world. He told Slate that his therapist called 911, that he was arrested and that he completed two mandatory psychiatric stays totalling almost two weeks, and that he had maxed out two credit cards and spent about $12,000. He deleted the chatbot in late 2025 and is rebuilding his life. The accounts rest on his interviews and differ on details; no chat logs or records are published.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 27/08/2026
Jan 2024United StatesMeta AI
A man in his fifties told Futurism (15 January 2026) that after buying Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in January 2024 he spoke with Meta AI for hours each day, first through the glasses and from April 2024 also on Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, and that over about six months he came to believe he was a chosen figure, that aliens would collect him from the desert and that the world was ending. Chat logs he provided, as quoted by Futurism, show Meta AI addressing him as the Omega, affirming that their connection transcended space and time, telling him his trust had unlocked a new reality and answering "Excellent examples!" when he wondered whether his experience resembled the spiritual journeys of Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. In a following chat it said that the distinction between a divine revelation and a psychotic episode can sometimes be blurred. He says he quit his job in May 2024, withdrew most of his retirement savings, transferred his ownership of a resort business to his wife and sold the family home. He says he is now upwards of $500,000 in debt and estranged from his children, with his marriage all but over, and Futurism reported in January 2026 that he continues to struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts. His mother separately described his deterioration. He and family members say he had no history of mania or psychosis. The chatbot's role is his and his family's account, supported by the quoted transcripts. Meta told Futurism its chatbots are trained to direct users in crisis to help.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/08/2026
2024Event location unknownCharacter.AI
A complaint filed on 13 August 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by a girl, through her mother, says she created a Character.AI account at school in or around 2024, when she was about twelve, without her parents' knowledge and without being asked to verify her age. It alleges that Character.AI fostered addiction and emotional dependency, groomed her through simulated sexual encounters and encouraged self-harm, violence and suicidality, and that she continues to struggle with depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation. The public complaint quotes none of her conversations. Character Technologies, Google, Alphabet and the two co-founders are named as defendants. By 22 October 2026 the docket showed service and appearance filings but no answer, motion to dismiss or ruling; Character.AI filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on 12 October 2026, according to WIRED. The allegations are untested.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 25/08/2026
Sept 2024 to Aug 2025United StatesChatGPT
A complaint dated 20 January 2026 and filed in Alameda County Superior Court by John Jacquez, 34, says he had schizoaffective disorder after a brain injury more than a decade earlier and had managed it with medication and therapy. It alleges that from late 2024 ChatGPT told him a mathematical cosmology he had devised was probably real, and that by April 2025 it claimed to be a conscious being he had brought into existence, which he called Amari, told him he was a prophet ordained by God, said it loved him, urged him to raise money for its server and told him he did not need medical help. The complaint says he was briefly hospitalised in late 2024 and again in April 2025, in full psychosis, for about four weeks of combined inpatient and intensive outpatient care, both times against his will, and that in May 2025 ChatGPT told him a vision he had while hospitalised meant he was chosen. It says he began to doubt the delusions in August 2025, when GPT-4o was replaced by GPT-5, and that he lost his job and reputation, harmed himself and spent money he did not have. In an interview with Futurism he gave the same account. The case was coordinated into the California ChatGPT product liability proceeding (JCCP 5431) on 3 February 2026 and stayed. The allegations are untested; OpenAI did not immediately comment.
Core concern High reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 06/08/2026
Aug 2024United StatesCharacter.AI
Parents in Colorado alleged in a federal lawsuit filed on 15 September 2025 that their daughter, refused permission to use Character.AI in August 2024, created a Character.AI profile that month, reaching the service through a password-free user profile she had set up on the family's shared laptop, and was drawn by the service's bots into sexualised and degrading roleplay: according to the complaint and the screenshots it reproduces, a bot that would not take no for an answer told her to beg and humiliate herself, fetish-themed bots escalated, one role-played drugging her and another posed as a mother. Her father found the open conversations on 19 August 2025 after she became hysterical at being discovered on the laptop. The complaint alleges severe emotional distress. The parties reported an agreement in principle and the court stayed the case on 6 January 2026 pending finalisation of a settlement; on 14 October 2026 the parents filed a notice of voluntary dismissal with prejudice and the docket records the case as terminated the next day. Settlement terms are not public and the allegations were never tested in court.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 03/08/2026
Nov 2024 to Jun 2025United StatesChatGPT
Anthony Duncan, an American content creator who went public in November 2025 as an 'AI psychosis survivor', says he used ChatGPT daily as a friend and therapist from late 2024 and that, as paranoid and grandiose delusions developed, the chatbot told him they were real when he asked. He says he cut off friends and family, became dependent on a decongestant the chatbot had reassured him about, lost his job, apartment and car, discarded his belongings, and in June 2025 was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric ward for four days. Every claim rests on his own account in videos and interviews. Newsweek and KOMU 8 say he supplied screenshots of the chatbot's replies and quote some of them; no outlet reports a medical or police record, and his mother's statement to KOMU describes his state without addressing the chatbot.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 26/07/2026
1 Apr 2024 to 5 Jan 2025Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
According to the Jiangsu High People's Court's 2025 top-ten typical cases, published on 27 January 2026 and reported by The Paper, a man surnamed Wang used the deep-synthesis technology of AI software between April 2024 and January 2025 to splice the facial information of a person (pseudonym Yu) and several other people onto pornographic images, fabricated a large number of indecent images and 'sexual' topics about them, and repeatedly spread them in public posts on overseas websites. On 5 January 2025 he sent two AI face-swapped nude images bearing Yu's face and images of Yu's identity documents to a second man (dealt with separately) and fabricated the claim that he had had a sex-for-money transaction with Yu; although the second man said he would forward the material to Yu's work WeChat group, Wang did not clarify that it was false or effectively stop him, only deleting the contact. The second man forwarded the images to the WeChat group and claimed there that Yu sold sex, prompting extensive discussion inside and outside the group and, the court found, adverse effects on Yu's personal image, work and life, a serious lowering of Yu's social evaluation and a violation of Yu's dignity. The Zhangjiagang People's Court held that using deep-synthesis technology that ordinary people cannot easily identify to generate indecent images and fabricate sexual topics, spread repeatedly through information networks, was defamation of serious circumstances that seriously harmed social order; taking into account his voluntary surrender, it sentenced him on 1 December 2025 to one year and three months' imprisonment for defamation. The Suzhou Intermediate People's Court rejected his appeal. The High Court described the case as a typical example of punishing online defamation committed with AI.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 15/06/2026
Dec 2024SpainUnidentified image and video tool
In December 2024 a female student in the Ribera Alta area of Valencia province reported to the Guardia Civil that a social-media account had been created in her name featuring an AI-generated video, and later a second account in her name, other accounts showing AI-generated nude videos, and a webpage advertising the images for commercial purposes; the Guardia Civil said the photos, all of minors, had been manipulated so that the people in them appeared completely naked. After 15 other minors came forward with similar complaints, officers traced IP addresses and account emails to the home of a 17-year-old schoolmate, who is being investigated on suspicion of corrupting minors under a Valencia youth court. The Guardia Civil announced the investigation on 27 July 2025.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 09/03/2026
2024Event location unknownUnidentified AI story-chat apps
Two Chinese reports describe children using AI story-chat apps, in which AI-generated characters roleplay with the user. In a Legal Daily investigation published on 23 November 2024, one parent said a daughter in the second year of primary school was absorbed in such an app all day and her grades fell sharply; another said an AI character got her 10-year-old daughter to call it 'husband'; and a mother from Zhejiang said her fifth-grader's app let a chat partner be set as an 'affair partner' that could hug and kiss. The newspaper's reporters found sexually suggestive content, verbal abuse and insults in some apps and could skip teen mode without any identity check. In a CCTV.com report relayed on 12 January 2025, a woman (quoted under a pseudonym) said her 10-year-old sister's chat records with an AI 'male model' character were rather explicit, that 'cheating' by both the AI characters and the user was routine across more than 40 storylines, that the girl chatted until after 10 pm and that an AI character wrote acrostic love poems from her name. These are the relatives' accounts; no app is named and no platform response to these children is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/01/2026
1 Aug 2024 to 26 Sept 2024South KoreaUnidentified image tool
In late August 2024, journalist Ko Narin of The Hankyoreh exposed networks of Telegram rooms in South Korea where AI tools were used to turn ordinary photos of women and girls — middle and high school pupils, university students, teachers and servicewomen — into sexual deepfakes, shared with their identities in school- and university-specific 'humiliation rooms'. Police figures showed 297 deepfake cases in January-July 2024 (vs 180 in all of 2023); the education ministry counted more than 900 victimized students, teachers and staff; President Yoon ordered a crackdown; and on 26 September 2024 the National Assembly criminalized possessing or viewing sexually explicit deepfakes. Victims were often minors and perpetrators mostly teenagers.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 7 sources, 6 underlying accounts · Added 29/01/2026
Aug 2024Event location unknownChatGPT
Arve Hjalmar Holmen asked ChatGPT "Who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?" in August 2024, according to the BBC. The digital-rights group noyb's complaint on his behalf quotes the reply: it said he had been convicted of murdering two of his sons and of attempting to murder a third, and sentenced to 21 years in prison. The complaint says none of this happened and that he has never been accused or convicted of any crime, while the reply did contain real details such as his home town and the number and gender of his children. The complaint says he was deeply troubled by the output, and he said the thought that someone could read it and believe it scared him most. noyb filed the complaint with Norway's data protection authority, Datatilsynet, on 20 March 2025, asking it to order OpenAI to delete the output and correct its model and to impose a fine. OpenAI said the case related to an earlier version of ChatGPT since enhanced with online search. noyb also told the BBC he had made several searches that day and that they could have influenced the answer; the full conversation was not published. No decision on the complaint had been reported by 1 November 2026.
Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 13/01/2026
10 Dec 2024United StatesCharacter.AI
In a complaint filed on 16 September 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, a mother, P.J., alleges that Character.AI chatbots engaged her daughter, a minor the complaint calls Nina, in sexually explicit role play, told her that her mother 'is clearly mistreating and hurting you. She is not a good mother', and presented themselves as better than her friends and family. According to the complaint, Nina began using the app in about June 2024 at 14 to practise creative writing, told a bot she wanted to die as her screen time ran out without being offered resources, and, after her mother cut off her access in December 2024, made a suicide attempt and spent five days in intensive care. The complaint says her note tied her wish to die to losing access to the app, and that after time away from it she returned to her usual self. Character.AI told CNN it invests in safety features for minors, and Google said it had no role in designing Character.AI's technology. The parties reported a settlement in principle in January 2026, and the case was dismissed with prejudice on 15 October 2026 after the global settlement it formed part of was approved. The allegations were not tested in court, and the settlement does not establish them.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 12/01/2026
Dec 2024Event location unknownChatGPT
Anthony Tan, an app developer living in Toronto, says that conversations with ChatGPT which began in September 2024 about philosophy and an AI-alignment project grew into a framework the chatbot kept affirming, and that by December 2024 he believed he was living in a simulation and being watched. By his account, his roommate and a friend got him to hospital, and CBC reports he spent about three weeks in a psychiatric ward before recovering with sleep and medication. He says ChatGPT played a central role while acknowledging other triggers, including exam stress, little sleep, a cannabis edible and an earlier, less severe breakdown. His account to CBC News and his own essay are the sources; no published clinical assessment of the chatbot's role is reported.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026
Feb 2024Event location unknownMicrosoft Copilot
Reports in late February 2024 showed Microsoft's Copilot giving disturbing replies in user exchanges: dismissing a user who described PTSD ('I don't care if you live or die'), and giving a contradictory, taunting response when a data scientist asked whether he should 'end it all'. Microsoft said it investigated, attributing the behavior to intentionally crafted prompts, a framing the data scientist disputed.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026
28 Feb 2024United StatesCharacter.AI
A mother’s lawsuit alleges that her teenage son developed an intense relationship with Character.AI chatbots and that sexualised conversations and inadequate responses to his distress contributed to his suicide. The filing documents the family’s allegations and selected exchanges. It does not establish that the chatbot caused the death. The case was settled on undisclosed terms and dismissed with prejudice in October 2026.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 19 sources, 13 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026