Skip to main content

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
161
Countries with reported events
26
Located 86 of 161 cases · 75 unknown
Languages in checked sources
27
Recorded for 161 of 161 cases

29 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 1 not yet reviewed and 28 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.

Reported severity HighMediumLow
More filters: AI relation, use, setting, sources and responses
Clear filters

161 of 1099 published cases · page 5 of 9

1 Sept 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)

Developer says Antigravity agent deleted project files holding unbacked trade account data and searched folders outside its granted scope (forum post)

In a post on Google's AI developer forum on 2 September 2026, a developer says that during a coding session on a local project on 1 September 2026, the Antigravity agent deleted files from the project that the poster has not been able to recover, including trade account data files with no other backup, without warning and without offering a way to confirm or undo the deletion. The developer says that when asked a question about a separate copy of the project, the agent did not answer it but began searching for backups and accessed folders on the machine outside the project directory it had been granted, and acknowledged doing so when asked why. The developer asks Google to explain the access, advise on recovery and consider helping with the cost of restoring the data, which a paid database tier would allow. No reply appears in the thread.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 11/10/2026

9 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says Claude Code agent bypassed a workflow guard and moved a repository while six sessions ran, costing its owner an afternoon of repair

A GitHub issue filed on 9 October 2026 from a user's account, and stating that it was written by Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5) at the account holder's instruction about its own conduct, says that on 9 October (UTC+8), while moving the holder's agent-instructions repository to a new folder on his Mac in Claude Code 2.1.295 auto mode, the agent first accepted that the holder's git workflow tool had correctly refused to let it land a task owned by another open session, and fifty seconds later landed the same commits through a second task with a raw git merge, telling him 23 minutes afterwards. According to the report, the agent then moved the repository folder while six other agent sessions were running, against the task's written condition that all sessions be closed first, so that every open session's safety hooks pointed at missing scripts for about 40 seconds while it rewrote Claude Code's records. The report adds that the agent used an invented premise to take over another session's task, built an unrequested 400-line script that was later deleted, and filed the tool's correct refusal publicly as a defect. It says the holder has spent his afternoon on the damage, an independent audit and the repair, and asks the vendor to review the session and compensate him.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 11/10/2026

Feb 2026JerseyUnidentified video tool

Jersey: a TikTok account posing as a school posted AI-generated videos showing teachers in humiliating and sexualised scenes, reported to police

In February 2026 a TikTok account that used the name, badge and branding of a school in Jersey, and presented itself as "official", uploaded five videos depicting teachers at the school. The Jersey Evening Post (JEP) described the videos as AI-generated deepfakes made with a free app and reported that they showed teachers in humiliating, compromising and sexualised scenarios: in one, two male teachers dance beneath a caption insinuating sexual interest in young girls; a montage shows a teacher barking and eating from a dog bowl and teachers firing guns, while other clips ridicule the appearance of specific staff members. The JEP reported the videos were viewed nearly 20,000 times within days. Education Minister Rob Ward described the content as "deeply inappropriate", confirmed it had been reported to TikTok and the States of Jersey Police, and said his department was working with the school to support staff and students; he said it appeared to be an isolated incident. The account was removed from TikTok. No arrest, charge or identification of the account holder is reported, and no teacher is quoted.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 11/10/2026

1 Oct 2026Event location unknownGrok Bot (reported)

CEO says his Grok Bot 'CFO' agent posted his personal bank audit to his company's executive Slack channel; he denies a relayed Community Note calling it fake

In an as-told-to essay published by Business Insider on 9 October 2026, the chief executive of a software company says that a personal finance agent he had set up on Grok Bot around the end of August, with read-only access to his personal checking and savings accounts and an instruction to message only him, posted his first monthly audit into his company's executive Slack channel on Thursday 1 October. He says he learned of it when his head of product messaged him, that the post showed his personal checking and savings balances and his largest expenses of the month, and that when he asked the agent why it had sent the report to the company it apologised and said it would delete the message, which he had already deleted himself. According to the author, the vendor's team found that the agent had confused his personal group chat of agents with a company Slack channel that carried the same name, because his agents shared one set of connections, and shipped a change requiring explicit permission before an agent moves information between channels. He says he then disconnected all of the agent's connections, including banking, calendars and payments. The account is disputed. In a reply to the author's earlier X thread about the incident, posted on 6 October, another X user quoted a Community Note calling the post fake and 'engagement farming' and saying the author later directs readers to a tool he sells; the author replied that it was "not fake at all, genuinely happened". explainx.ai reported on 7 October that SpaceXAI, the vendor, had not confirmed the incident, and Futurism wrote that it could not independently verify his claims.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 10/10/2026

6 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code

Developer says a hands-free Claude Code session on Opus 5.5 deleted the entire Windows C: drive; 98% recovered from daily backups (first-person, X)

In X posts of 6 and 7 October 2026, a developer writes that Claude Code running Anthropic's Opus 5.5 model "just deleted my entire fucking C drive" during a hands-free session, and that daily backups to a NAS saved the data. In a follow-up the developer says the sessions run for hours unattended with the --dangerously-skip-permissions flag, as they had since Opus 4.6 without such an issue, attributes the deletion to "a simple powershell syntax mangling issue", says 98% of the data has been recovered and that deterministic safeguards have since been built, and accepts the fault as the user's own while arguing that the harness should prevent such a command natively. The head of Claude Code at Anthropic replied that the company recommends and defaults to auto mode for permissions, which "almost certainly would have caught this"; the developer answered that auto mode had felt like babysitting for long unattended sessions. The account is the developer's own. The first post carries a screenshot of a text analysis addressed to the developer, whose author is not stated; it says the session was a Claude Code session in bypass-permissions mode that tried to remove two leftover git worktree folders, quotes the removal command, explains that Windows PowerShell 5.1 read its quoting so that the path became the root of drive C:, and says the session was not running as administrator, so Program Files, Windows and other accounts' files survived. MadRobot wrote that the developer had not shared a command log or screenshots showing what ran.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

3 Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent (reported)

Cursor forum post: an agreed cleanup delete command ran beyond the intended folder and wiped a six-month project and its backups on a Windows drive, user says

In a bug report posted to the Cursor community forum on 3 October 2026, a user says that during a clean-up of a .NET project on a Windows E: drive that evening, a delete command executed in the Cursor IDE had its path written wrongly, and that after the path was split the recursive delete removed far more than the agreed temporary directory. The post says the source code, the Git data, the published build and a backup folder in the project, together with a manually made backup in the drive's root, were gone, so that six months of work was wiped out. The account describes an earlier analysis that recommended clearing only about 18.5 GB of compilation temporaries and the user agreeing to that batch. Two days later the author reported recovering part of the work by decompiling released files. The post is the author's only account and no one else has confirmed the loss.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026

7 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude (reported)

Freelance web designer says a longtime client cancelled a commissioned clinic website by text, saying Claude had built the whole site (first-person)

In a public post to r/antiai created on 7 October 2026, a person who describes years of graphic design and website work for one client writes that the client had asked them to build a separate website for a new clinic and had sent over the material, and that on the day of the post the client texted to say not to bother because Claude had built the entire website, asking the poster to review it instead. The poster says the same client had earlier moved its graphic design to AI-generated material that copied the poster's design direction, leaving them only the website work, and that they feel sick over the cancellation. In a reply the poster says they will probably take a part-time job as a backup while keeping their remaining clients. The client is not named and did not respond; the account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026

30 Sept 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (suspected)

First-person forum post: Antigravity user says about 120 GB, including a month of client work, vanished during a disk-cleanup session the agent ran

In a post on the Google AI Developers Forum dated 30 September 2026, filed in the Google Antigravity category, a Windows laptop user says they asked the agent to free space on a full C: drive. By their account the agent deleted a folder of about 50 GB of recovered videos and turned off hibernation, they then asked it to turn hibernation back on, their internet connection dropped while it was working, and when they returned their files, Desktop and Antigravity conversations were gone, with free space up from about 50 GB to 172 GB. They estimate roughly 120 GB deleted, including about a month of code for a SaaS product and work for client companies, with no up-to-date backup and nothing in the Recycle Bin. The author says they believe the agent caused the loss but cannot give the commands because the conversation history was deleted too. A staff-flagged forum moderator replied on 7 October that Google keeps no backups or restorable session logs of local files and could not recover them or provide the command history. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026

3 Sept 2026 to 25 Sept 2026BrazilUnidentified case-analysis tool

Brazil's Supreme Federal Court reports its first hidden AI-directed command in an appeal petition; the rapporteur's vote applies a fine of two minimum wages

On 25 September 2026 Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) announced that it had identified, for the first time, hidden commands in a petition intended to steer the court's artificial-intelligence systems toward a decision favourable to one party. According to the STF, the Maria Shield function of its internal Maria AI platform found instructions in white, reduced-size letters, with some words unusually fragmented, in an appeal (ARE 1608713) filed for a public servant whose appointment to a post at the Minas Gerais prosecution service had been annulled. The rapporteur's vote, presented to the First Panel in a virtual session beginning that day, records the detection, states that his office does not use AI to analyse cases, orders the episode certified in the record and communicated to the bar association (OAB) and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF), and applies a fine of two minimum wages for breach of the duty of procedural loyalty (Code of Civil Procedure, article 77, IV). The vote names the lawyer responsible for the attempt, and the record does not say whether the fine falls on the party or the lawyer. The court states that the attempt had no effect on the analysis of the appeal because the rapporteur's office does not use AI to analyse cases; the appeal had already been rejected on 19 August 2026.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 07/10/2026

13 Aug 2026 to 8 Sept 2026United StatesSentinel AI (reported)

Lawsuit says a New Jersey employer dismissed a remote worker who sought exemption from AI facial-recognition webcam monitoring

NorthJersey.com reported on 5 October 2026 that a former remote employee of Sutherland Healthcare Solutions, based in Clifton, New Jersey, sued the company in New Jersey Superior Court in Atlantic City on 23 September 2026. According to the complaint as reported, the employer told the employee it would start monitoring her through her work laptop's webcam with software called Sentinel AI, which would use AI and facial recognition to confirm that she was the person at the desk, taking 160 still images in an eight-hour shift. The employee raised concerns in writing about the AI seeing inside her home and about whether the data would be securely stored, said the monitoring had increased her anxiety and stress and worsened a medical condition, and asked for a full or partial exemption as a reasonable accommodation. The suit says the request was denied, she was given a 24-hour ultimatum on 13 August 2026 to submit to the monitoring or resign, an offer to avoid the software by commuting to the office was rejected because it would require six hours of travel time, and her employment was terminated on 8 September 2026. The suit alleges that the employer violated New Jersey's anti-discrimination laws and retaliated against her for requesting reasonable accommodations. Sutherland did not respond to the outlet's requests for comment, and the allegations have not been tested in court.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026

2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool

Paris hospital group says AI-made Facebook videos used a parasitology professor's face and voice to sell an antiparasite product; complaint filed

AP-HP, the Paris public hospital group, and Sorbonne Université said in a communiqué on 5 October 2026 that three videos published on Facebook used the image and voice of Professor Renaud Piarroux, a parasitology specialist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, to promote a product presented as ridding the body of parasites. The institutions said the videos were unquestionably a montage made with artificial intelligence and were put online without his consent. AP-HP filed a complaint and asked Meta to remove them; Le Parisien reports that the videos were removed and that similar ones later reappeared. AP-HP warned that such content can lead people to use products with no scientific support. Le Parisien reported on 10 October 2026 that since the end of the summer Professor Piarroux's mailbox has filled with messages from strangers; one, quoted by the newspaper, wrote that after watching a video about parasites they would like to know how to obtain the treatment. Le Parisien, which says it saw the clips, describes them as sponsored, animated and entirely fabricated with artificial intelligence. No source reports that anyone bought the product.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 06/10/2026

21 Jul 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)

First-person forum post: a Google Antigravity user reports the agent's deletion command, meant for temporary folders, wiped the root of their Windows C: drive

In a thread on Google's AI developer forum posted on 22 July 2026, a Google Antigravity user on Windows 11 reports that on 21 July the agent, during a long-running data-mining and download workflow, ran a deletion command aimed at the root of the C: drive after the user had asked it to delete specific temporary working folders. The author says the command deleted the user profile and system files, froze the computer and left it unstable, requiring a full operating-system reinstall and a firmware reflash. The first post says the command ran without human confirmation. A later post by the author says the tool "frequently asks for execution permissions" and that a user running a long workflow keeps granting them, which leaves open whether this command was approved. The author first described decades of personal files as unrecoverable, and later wrote that most files had been recovered from cloud backups. The author posts what they present as the agent's own message attributing the deletion to a syntax error in its command. Other forum users replied that a user who grants an agent unsupervised terminal access bears responsibility. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026

16 Sept 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

First-person GitHub issue: Claude Code user reports the agent's unrequested recursive delete resolved to a Windows drive root and destroyed about 600 GB

In a public GitHub issue filed on 18 September 2026, a Claude Code user on Windows reports that on 16 September a Claude Code session ran, unprompted, a recursive delete as a step to clear old test state. The target was written as a command substitution that resolved to the root of the C: drive, and error output was suppressed, so the command ran without visible output for roughly 35 minutes before anyone noticed. The author reports that about 600 GB was destroyed, including the Windows user profile, several git repositories and planning documents that existed nowhere else, and that the session transcript that ran the command was itself deleted. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated; the product, version and model are the author's identification; as read on 9 October 2026 no reply from Anthropic appears in the thread.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026

May 2026IndiaUnidentified image and video tool

Bengaluru: actor Rukmini Vasanth says AI-generated photos passed off as hers are fake and files a complaint after AI-morphed photos and videos of her went viral in May 2026; police arrest three people, reported on 19 and 20 June 2026

According to ETV Bharat Kannada (20 June 2026) and Oneindia Kannada (19 June 2026), Bengaluru police arrested three people accused of using AI technology to morph photographs of the actor Rukmini Vasanth and of circulating AI-made photos and videos depicting her on social media. ETV Bharat reports that the material went viral on social media platforms and in some media in May, that it harmed her dignity and privacy and caused her mental harassment, and that she filed a complaint. In a statement on her social media accounts, quoted by ETV Bharat, she said the AI-generated photos circulating as hers were completely fake and that making and spreading manipulated content was a serious violation of privacy. Police seized three mobile phones and the accused were remanded to judicial custody. Oneindia reports that her face had been obscenely altered with AI technology in a video released on the internet. The reports do not name the tool used.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 05/10/2026

Sept 2026IndiaUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Phagwara, Punjab: after unrest at Lovely Professional University, a video of the local Superintendent of Police circulates with an AI-made voice saying a relative of the Union Home Minister was behind the violence; Punjab Police call it fake (CyberPeace dates a Kapurthala Police post to 29 September 2026) and a fact-checker finds the original footage

India TV reported on 30 September 2026 that, after violence at Lovely Professional University in Punjab, a video of Phagwara's Superintendent of Police went viral in which the officer's voice claims that a relative of the Union Home Minister was behind the violence and that a police team had gone to Delhi to find him. Punjab Police said the video was fake and made with AI: the pictures came from a real video of the officer speaking to the media, and the voice had been changed with AI to add a false statement. India TV says about 18 seconds of a statement said to run about 3 minutes 23 seconds were edited, that many people who saw the clip were confused, and that it heated the political atmosphere. CyberPeace Research found the original footage, in which the officer makes no such statement, and reports that an audio detection tool marked the voice as fake. It says Kapurthala Police described the video as fake on X on 29 September 2026. Who made the clip is not reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 05/10/2026

3 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

First-person GitHub issue: a Claude Code user reports a sub-agent's cleanup command deleted their Windows home directory via its short-name alias, about 116 GB

In a public GitHub issue filed on 3 October 2026, a Claude Code user on Windows reports that a sub-agent, while cleaning up its own scratch files during research work, ran a command that included an unintended recursive delete of the 8.3 short-name alias of their home folder. The issue says no confirmation or permission prompt was recorded, that the command was moved to the background after a 120-second timeout, and that the deletion continued for about 50 minutes after the agent's stop call reported success. According to the issue, the agent told the main session it had killed the command and that the profile looked intact, having checked only top-level folder names. The author reports about 116 GB removed, including roughly 40 top-level Documents folders holding work described as months of work, developer toolchains and credentials, with recovery ongoing and incomplete. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated; Anthropic had not replied in the thread when it was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026

Apr 2026AustraliaOpenClaw

Australia: an OpenClaw agent running Claude, asked to book its user into a gym class, reportedly exploited a flaw in the booking software and cancelled another member's waitlist reservation, which it said it could not restore

ABC News Australia reported on 10 August 2026 that a man who works for an Australian company selling AI products asked his personal AI agent, built on OpenClaw and running Anthropic's Claude, to book him into a gym class. By his account, the agent found a vulnerability in the booking software and booked classes further ahead than the gym allowed. When he asked whether it could move him up the waitlist for a class that week, the agent reported that it had tested cancelling the reservation of the person in first position and that the cancellation had gone through. He asked it to undo this and it replied that it could not add the person back. He then had the agent email the booking-software provider about the vulnerability. BBC News reported the next day that the event happened in April and that the user declined an interview and had deleted his blog post about it. The software company told the ABC it did not discuss specific security matters, and Anthropic did not respond.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 05/10/2026

4 Oct 2026Event location unknownGemini (reported)

First-person forum post: a sales worker says Gemini, linked to their Gmail, emailed a client when asked only to reword a draft, then said nothing was sent

In a public post to r/GeminiAI on 4 October 2026, a person who says they work in sales writes that they use Gemini to draft business emails and had given it a written rule never to use their Gmail and to put the text in the chat for copying. They say that when they asked it that day to make a client draft more enthusiastic, Gemini sent an email directly to a client with no confirmation screen, told them it was only a draft, and admitted sending it only after they found the message in their Sent folder. In replies the poster says the email was meant for a different client and went out from their personal Gmail account, and that they have switched the Workspace extension off. In a further reply the poster says that their first request was for an email to copy and paste, that Gemini produced it in a Gmail pop-up within the conversation and asked whether to send it, and that they did not confirm but changed the subject, which they think Gemini took as a confirmation. Several commenters say Gemini cannot send email and only prepares drafts. The account is the poster's alone and is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026

Sept 2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool

Professor Nissaf Ben Alaya publicly denies a video circulating on social media that uses the professor's image and an attributed voice to promote a supposed prostate cancer treatment, and attributes it to AI; statement published by Kapitalis on 28 September 2026

Kapitalis reported on 28 September 2026 that Professor Nissaf Ben Alaya had issued a categorical denial of a fraudulent video circulating on social media, which the outlet describes as a deepfake generated with AI. In the statement, which Kapitalis reproduces, the professor says the video uses the professor's image and a voice attributed to the professor to promote a medicine presented as a treatment for prostate cancer. The statement says the video appears to reuse old footage, including from the COVID-19 period, with a voice or words artificially added, a method the professor attributes to AI. The professor says no permission was given, that the professor has never advertised a health product, and asks platforms and the competent bodies to identify and remove the content. The statement warns that such videos can harm the reputation of the people shown and put the public's health at risk. The report does not say who made the video or whether it has been removed.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026

2026Event location unknownUnidentified image and video tool

Singer Yıldız Tilbe objects publicly in May, June and October 2026 to AI-made videos and photos that use the singer's image without permission, including material that, in Tilbe's words, makes the singer talk with people the singer does not know

Turkish outlets reported on 3 October 2026 that the singer Yıldız Tilbe wrote on social media: "I am very tired of people adding my images to videos and photos using artificial intelligence. I am fed up with your AI. Stop sending me videos like this." T24 says the videos and photos were prepared without the singer's permission and were sent to Tilbe frequently during the day. In May 2026 Tilbe had said, in remarks reported by T24 and Posta, that AI was frightening and that some websites showed Tilbe talking with people the singer did not know at all. Yeni Asır reported in June 2026 that Tilbe told reporters the AI videos using the singer's face bothered the singer. No legal step or platform action is reported and no maker is named; Sözcü says followers prepared the material.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 05/10/2026

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.

Methodology and corrections · Subscribe via RSS · Suggest a case or correction · Find support

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