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NOPE · AI and people

AI incidents

Reports of AI-related harm and adverse experiences affecting people’s safety, wellbeing, rights and livelihoods. Explore what happened and the evidence available.

NOPE’s core concern is when AI communicates with a person, acts on their behalf, or depicts or impersonates them. The tracker also records consequential decisions, claims and privacy harms involving AI. Each case needs a described connection between AI use and the harm, including private information recorded into or disclosed to an AI service. Each account is reviewed for publication; claims may remain uncorroborated or disputed. How we review and count cases

In this selection

Published cases
450
Countries with reported events
48
Located 269 of 450 cases · 181 unknown
Languages in checked sources
42
Recorded for 450 of 450 cases

65 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 1 not yet reviewed and 64 reviewed as unknown. Show these cases

These figures describe the cases collected by NOPE. Coverage varies with discovery, reporting and available evidence. They do not estimate how often AI-related harm occurs.

Response counts currently use each case’s principal recorded outcome. Further proceedings may be described in its account.

Cases in this selection, counted once in their first known event year. A series may continue beyond that year. Reporting and collection dates are excluded. NOPE has searched recent events more thoroughly than earlier years, so bar heights also reflect collection effort.

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450 of 1099 published cases · page 5 of 23

Event date unknownIndiaUnidentified image and document tool

Kanpur Dehat, India: police say a man posing as a Secretariat official used AI-made photos with national leaders and AI-made appointment letters in a job fraud

Police in Akbarpur, Kanpur Dehat district (Uttar Pradesh), arrested a man on the night of 23 October 2026 who, they say, called himself a deputy director at the state Secretariat in Lucknow and took money from job seekers for government posts. Five people had jointly complained on 22 October that he took lakhs of rupees from them, gave them fake appointment letters for review officer and clerk posts and threatened to kill them when they asked for their money back. According to the station officer as reported by Amar Ujala, his office held several AI-made pictures showing him with the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister and other public representatives, which police seized; Amar Ujala reports that he showed such pictures to win people's trust. In police questioning, as relayed by Amar Ujala and Aman Yatra Live, he said that he made a fake identity card with AI tools and that appointment letters and orders prepared with AI were printed and handed or posted to candidates. The police do not say how the AI use was established or which tool was used. He was produced in court and sent to jail, and police say they are searching for other members of the group.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 25/10/2026

2025RussiaAntiplagiat AI-text detector

Russia: university expelled a student after its Antiplagiat AI-content check flagged her thesis; Kazan courts ordered reinstatement and damages

RAPSI and BIZNES Online reported on 8 and 10 June 2026 that the Supreme Court of Tatarstan upheld a ruling that a private Moscow university unlawfully expelled a distance-learning student in 2025 over suspected use of AI in her graduation thesis. According to the university's representatives in court as reported, the Antiplagiat.Vuz system first showed about 41% (41.91%) AI-generated text, her supervisor then said the word order had been deliberately disturbed in more than 70% of the text, and a third check showed 11.92%. BIZNES Online also reports, from the court documents, that a university representative told the court the supervisor does not operate the checking system and had not in fact analysed the text for neural-network generation, and could not explain how the system distinguishes borrowed text from AI generation. The university refused the revised work as late (uploaded on Monday 9 June 2025 against a deadline of 8 June) and expelled her; the department's protocol cited a breach of good-faith work in the Antiplagiat.Vuz system. She denied using AI. In January 2026 the Vakhitovsky District Court of Kazan held the expulsion unlawful, ordered her reinstatement for a check of her thesis and, if it met the originality threshold, admission to the defence, and awarded 40,000 roubles in moral damages and a 20,000-rouble fine. The Supreme Court of Tatarstan dismissed the university's appeal: it held that the probabilistic report had not been checked by a competent expert and could not be the sole proof of bad faith, noted that the same text was classified as AI-generated in one report and not in another, and found no evidence that any flagged fragments resulted from her deliberate acts rather than her sources or an incorrect algorithm. The courts also held the deadline had been miscounted.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/10/2026

Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude (reported)

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

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

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

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

23 Jun 2025NetherlandsChatGPT

Dutch court rules a recruitment consultant's summary dismissal invalid; his employer had cited his ChatGPT queries about severance among seven grounds

On 23 June 2025 a recruitment agency summarily dismissed a recruitment consultant it had employed since January 2024, giving seven grounds in its dismissal letter. One ground, misuse of company resources and an integrity breach, concerned questions he had put to ChatGPT on his work laptop about how to obtain a severance payment from the employer: the employer said he made defamatory statements about it there and breached his duty of confidentiality with the information he entered. He did not dispute the queries. In a decision given on 27 February 2026, the sub-district judge of the Rechtbank Zeeland-West-Brabant ruled the dismissal invalid, because the employer had not established another ground and the seven grounds formed a single composite reason. On the ChatGPT ground the judge found that private use of the laptop had not been forbidden, that he had shared only information about his employment relationship and no company secrets, and that this was culpable to a limited extent. In a final decision of 22 May 2026 the court awarded him a transition payment of 2,976.04 euros gross, fixed damages of 4,565.70 euros gross and costs, but refused the 25,000 euros of fair compensation he sought, weighing his limited income loss and his own culpable conduct, which it listed as including his sharing of information about the employment relationship. His fixed-term contract would have ended on 1 August 2025, when he started a new job.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified AI tool

New hire says employer let them go in their first week for using its own internal AI tool on a compliance training, after telling the manager (first-person)

In a public post to r/jobs created on 24 October 2026, a software engineer with about three years of experience writes that, after three and a half months of assessments and eight interviews, they joined a well-known multinational company that they do not name. In the first week they were given a compliance training whose questions they found ambiguous, and they used the company's own internal AI tool to help, telling their manager, who they say was fine with it. The following Monday, the poster writes, HR joined their one-to-one meeting and told them they were being let go for using AI on the training; the call lasted a couple of minutes and they lost access shortly afterwards. The poster says that a month later about 400 applications and more than 150 cold emails had brought almost nothing back and that they are stressed. The employer, its location and the date of the dismissal are not stated. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no employer statement was retrieved.

Core concern Medium reported severity

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

May 2025Event location unknownUnidentified video tool

AI-altered video showed Pope Leo XIV giving an address to Burkina Faso's leader that he never gave; Vatican News disowned it and AFP found AI audio

In May 2025, days after his election, a video circulated on YouTube, Facebook and X in which Pope Leo XIV appears to read an English-language address praising Burkina Faso's military leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré. The Holy See's Vatican News service published an article on 21 May saying the speech had been created with artificial intelligence and falsely attributed to the Pope, and that footage from his 12 May audience with journalists had been morphed so that his lips matched AI-generated words. AFP Fact Check traced the footage to the same press audience, where the Pope spoke in Italian and did not mention Africa or Traoré, and reported that an audio forensic tool gave a 99 percent probability that the audio was AI-generated. CNA reported in September 2025 that the video received at least a million views before YouTube terminated the account that posted it, and that the Vatican's communications office spends much of its time reporting accounts that post AI videos of the Pope. The YouTube channel's description, as AFP reports, called the video a work of fiction.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 25/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude (reported)

Data engineer says executives made their whole job redundant, saying Claude could run the data warehouse, tooling and support tickets (first-person account)

In a public post to r/layoffs titled 'Laid off by claude', created on 21 October 2026, a person who describes themselves in a reply as a data engineer who also did reporting, AI and frontend work writes that executives are of the opinion that Claude can manage a data warehouse, custom tooling, support tickets, servers and new product features, and that they have said the poster's whole job is redundant because AI can do it all. The poster writes that they did not have the mental capacity to argue and accepted what they call 'the MSA', and that they feel numb and are unsure whether they want to stay in the tech industry. The employer, its location and the date of the layoff are not stated. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no employer statement was retrieved, and no source describes Claude actually taking over the work.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

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

Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent

Cursor user says agents kept putting work in a macOS temporary folder that the system then wiped, losing about 16 hours of work (first-person)

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

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

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

Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT (reported)

Spanish singer Luis Cepeda says a download page ChatGPT recommended carried malware that stole his Gmail account and his YouTube channel

In an open letter on his social media, reported by Marca on 21 October 2026 and by Que.es on 22 October, the Spanish singer Luis Cepeda said that while he was looking for a DLSS5 download, ChatGPT recommended a page that contained malware. He said that running the program it recommended led to the theft of his main Gmail account, whose birth date, parental controls and recovery options were changed, and that the account was also the email for his YouTube channel, Stripe and Coinbase. He said he had lost access to his official YouTube channel, which Que.es reports now appears under another name, and criticised YouTube and Google for offering no human contact for account recovery. He said he normally analyses what he runs but trusted a page ChatGPT had recommended. The account is his own; OpenAI has not commented in the sources read.

Core concern Medium reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified image tool

Lipetsk region court gives man suspended sentence for AI-made pornographic collages of nine women taken from open accounts, court press service says

According to the court press services of the Bryansk and Lipetsk regions, as relayed by 7info (4 June 2026) and CNews (5 June 2026), the Zadonsk district court in the Lipetsk region convicted a local man of illegally making and distributing pornographic material. He had created a social-media group with erotic content and, to fill it, downloaded photographs of nine women from open accounts and used neural networks to turn them into pornographic photo-collages with naked bodies, which were published openly without the knowledge or consent of the women depicted. He admitted guilt and fully compensated all the victims for moral harm. The court sentenced him in June 2026 to three years' imprisonment, suspended, with five years' probation and a ban on administering internet sites, pages and other resources for the same period. When the images were made and how long the group was online are not stated.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

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

Event date unknownTürkiyeUnidentified AI research tool

Ankara lawyer faces prosecutor and bar investigations after an AI tool added Court of Cassation decisions with wrong numbers to a petition, Kısa Dalga reports

Kısa Dalga reported on 17 June 2026 that a lawyer in Ankara faced investigations by the prosecutor's office and the Ankara Bar after a petition the lawyer signed in a civil case at a court in the Kızılcahamam district cited Court of Cassation (Yargıtay) decisions with wrong case and decision numbers. According to the lawyer, three lawyers prepared the petition and used AI only to support it with case law; the AI tool inserted existing Court of Cassation decisions but wrote their reference numbers wrongly. Opposing counsel raised the citations at the hearing, and the same day the court wrote to the bar and the prosecutor; the lawyer says the court stated the decisions could not be found as cited in the national judicial system (UYAP) and that the numbers gave the impression of having been written at random. The lawyer says the prosecutor did not specify the alleged offence, that the error was unintentional, and that the lawyer became a joke among colleagues. A lawyers' rights group called the investigations pressure on the defence. The AI tool is not named, the hearing date is not given and no outcome of either investigation has been reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownRevoicer text-to-speech (reported)

Irish voiceover artist says an AI text-to-speech voice made from her recordings was resold online and used in ads and products she never booked

Remie Michelle Clarke, a voiceover artist in Dublin, told Bloomberg Law in April 2023 and Marketplace in June 2023 that a synthetic voice built from recordings she had made for Microsoft's text-to-speech software was being sold by a third-party AI voice company, Revoicer, as a voice called Olivia that customers could make say anything. She said she learned of it when a fellow actor asked whether another voice job had paid her well, that she had since found a number of adverts and a couple of tech products using her voice, and that buyers choosing the AI voice was affecting her smaller jobs. She said she was completely shocked. Microsoft told Marketplace that it informs voice talent and obtains their legal consent to create synthetic voices; it did not address the resale. No response from Revoicer and no legal action are reported in the inspected sources.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

Apr 2025ChinaUnidentified video tool

Beijing Internet Court finds a short-drama maker used AI face-swapping to give a performer a well-known actress's likeness, infringing her portrait rights

On 20 March 2026 the Beijing Internet Court announced a portrait-rights judgment over an online short drama in which, it found, the production company used deep-synthesis (AI face-swap) technology to generate an image highly similar to a well-known actress, according to Beijing Daily and a Sina Finance report drawing on it. In April 2025 internet users had questioned whether the drama had face-swapped a performer into the actress, and many believed she had appeared in it. The court found that two segments of the 44-episode, roughly 90-minute drama used AI face-swapping and that the face resembled the actress closely enough for the public to identify her. The maker argued that the image was generated by AI without any prompt relating to her and could not reproduce its process in court. The court held the maker liable for portrait-rights infringement and the broadcaster liable for failing to review the content, and ordered both to post written apologies on their video accounts and pay economic damages; neither appealed. The amount is not reported in the sources read.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 24/10/2026

May 2023ItalyUnidentified image tool

Rome labour court upholds a graphic designer's dismissal in a reorganisation in which her remaining design work was done partly with AI tools

A graphic designer hired in March 2022 by a cybersecurity company was dismissed in May 2023 for a justified objective reason, which the company gave as an internal reorganisation and the suppression of her post to contain costs during an economic crisis. She challenged the dismissal, arguing that the reorganisation was a pretext and that her tasks had been redistributed to other workers, not eliminated. According to legal press reports of the judgment, the company said the graphic-design tasks were first absorbed by other staff and the residual work was then done partly with the support of artificial-intelligence tools, which the marketing manager used to produce graphics of adequate quality at lower cost and in less time. The labour section of the Tribunale di Roma (judgment no. 9135 of 19 November 2025) found a real crisis and reorganisation, no possibility of redeploying her, and upheld the dismissal. The reports say the court treated AI as one of the tools the company used to make its structure more efficient, not as an autonomous cause of the dismissal; a commentary in Giustizia Insieme calls the publicity around a first dismissal caused by AI out of proportion to the ruling. The judgment itself was not read, and whether it was appealed is not reported.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 24/10/2026

2024ItalyUnidentified image tool

Italian administrative court upholds Genoa university's dismissal of a lecturer who made sexualised images of six students, reportedly with AI

In 2024 an associate professor at the University of Genoa took photos from the social-media profiles of six students, turned them into sexual images and shared them in Telegram chats. According to la Repubblica's October 2024 report, Genoa prosecutors accused him of 'undressing' the photos with apps that use artificial intelligence; the investigation began on 1 October 2024 after the rector's complaint, the postal police searched his office and home, and he was suspended. The university later dismissed him. According to Open and Fanpage, which report the judgment, the regional administrative court for Liguria (TAR) rejected his appeal against the dismissal in September 2026, citing a search record that found sexual virtual images on his computer matching those posted, and his interrogation, in which he admitted posting the images and creating them with software. The court found the repeated conduct harmful to the students' dignity and to the university. The criminal case, for aggravated defamation, was closed; the lecturer paid the students compensation. The tool used is not identified.

Core concern High reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 24/10/2026

2023Event location unknownUnidentified generative AI tools

IgniteTech CEO says he replaced nearly 80% of staff in 2023 and early 2024 after employees resisted his generative-AI mandate

Fortune reported on 17 August 2025 that Eric Vaughan, chief executive of the enterprise-software company IgniteTech, replaced nearly 80% of the company's staff within a year after deciding in early 2023 that generative AI was an existential transformation, according to headcount figures Fortune reviewed. Vaughan told Fortune that over 2023 and into early 2024 the company replaced hundreds of employees, declining to give a number. He said staff were required to work only on AI projects every Monday and that 20% of payroll went to AI learning, and that employees who flatly refused were let go ('we said goodbye to those people'); technical staff were the most resistant, raising concerns about what the AI could not do. He said it was extremely difficult and not something he recommends, but that he would do it again. The account is the employer's; no dismissed employee is quoted.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownRevoicer text-to-speech (reported)

British voice actor says an AI clone of his voice, built from an old IBM recording and sold to websites, has cost him jobs

Greg Marston, a British voice actor, said in accounts published in 2023 that an AI-generated clone of his voice, built from a recording he had made for IBM years earlier, was being sold to websites that were using it to build a synthetic voice that could say anything. Julia Angwin's New York Times column (republished by the Oman Observer on 25 September 2023) says he found the clone, called Connor, online and heard his voice on the Wimbledon website during the tennis tournament; Cryptopolitan (1 July 2023) says he found it on Revoicer, an AI text-to-speech site. He had signed a release allowing the recording to be used in many ways, but said he never agreed to having his voice cloned to compete against him. He estimated that the clone had already lost him jobs and was working with a lawyer to seek compensation. IBM said it was aware of his concern and was discussing it with him. The outcome is not reported in the inspected sources.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

23 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI phone support system

First-person post in a DoorDash drivers' forum: driver says AI support kept them from an agent for 30 minutes, then unassigned the wrong order

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)

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

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

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

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

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: 04/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.