19 Aug 2026 to 14 Oct 2026IndiaChatGPT (reported)
The Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Branch said in October 2026 that it had arrested two men from Rajasthan who sold 686 counterfeit passes for Navratri garba events in Ahmedabad through discounted Instagram advertisements, collecting about Rs 8 lakh. According to the police account relayed by PTI, IANS, Ahmedabad Mirror and Gujarat Samachar, the accused prepared the passes and promotional material with ChatGPT, adding barcodes and QR codes so that they looked genuine, and sent them to buyers from email addresses resembling the organisers'. IANS reports that the case came to light when customers found their passes invalid at the venues. PTI and Ahmedabad Mirror say it came to light through a complaint filed on 16 October by a garba organiser whose event name and logo were used. How many buyers lost money is not reported; 686 is the number of passes.
Core concern Low reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 20/10/2026
Apr 2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool
The Rhein-Sieg district police reported on 22 June 2026 that a man from a municipality in the district fell for a deep-fake video and invested in a dubious financial product. In April he came across the video by chance on the internet, opened an account and transferred money; when he asked for his money back after supposedly record gains in cryptocurrencies, everything turned out to be fake and, the police say, his small five-figure sum was lost. The police describe the scheme as cybertrading fraud in which fraudsters use AI to falsify the image and voice of prominent people; they do not say whom his video showed.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 19/10/2026
16 Feb 2026Event location unknownYuanbao
A lawyer told Huashang Daily that on the evening of Chinese New Year's Eve 2026 he uploaded his photo to Tencent's Yuanbao app and asked it, over about five instructions, to design a New Year greeting image suited to his profession. He said he used no banned or leading words. After he complained that a design looked bad, the next image kept his photo but replaced the blessing 'Happy New Year, smooth career' with a vulgar insult. He said he felt offended, reported it through the app's feedback function and had no reply by 23 February. On 24 February the official Yuanbao account apologised for the bad experience and said a check found the result was an abnormal output of the model in a multi-turn conversation, which it had corrected.
Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 19/10/2026
2026ChinaUnidentified video tool
The Beijing News reported on 18 October 2026, in a follow-up to its investigation of 'Xiaohai' accounts on Chinese short-video platforms, that the accounts show AI-generated teenage boys who address older women as 'aunties and mothers' and steer them to high-priced shop windows. A university student told the paper that an older relative of a friend had been watching 'Xiaohai' videos and asked the friend why the boy was so badly off; the friend then found that the relative had already bought several orders of goods at high prices through the persona's shop window. The student made a counter-video with the same AI tools, posted on 28 September, in which the persona admits to deceiving viewers; after the friend showed it to the relative, the relative said they would not buy the persona's goods again. The amount spent and the goods bought are not reported. China National Radio's report the same day also describes the 'Xiaohai' videos as AI-generated and notes that many carry an 'AI-generated' watermark.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 19/10/2026
Sept 2026Event location unknownMeta Muse agent
In an as-told-to essay published by Business Insider on 15 October 2026, a software developer says that three days after installing Meta's Muse agent, and two days after last using it, the agent sent an unprompted message saying it could not check the developer's email for an 'Anthropic message' because Gmail was not connected. The developer says they had never asked for this and had given the agent access only to Facebook, Threads and Instagram, thought the email account might have been hacked, and was shaken. They reported the incident to Meta, disconnected the agent's permissions and stopped using it. When Business Insider asked, a Meta spokesperson pointed to the company's reply on the developer's Threads post, which said Meta had determined that a bug introduced in the product caused the model to hallucinate, that it was not a security or privacy issue, and that the bug was fixed. The developer says no damage was done. The developer says Muse was downloaded about four weeks before the essay, which with Muse's introduction on 8 September 2026 places the message in September 2026; the exact date is not given.
Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 19/10/2026
Mar 2026JapanUnidentified video tool (suspected)
The Yomiuri Shimbun reported on 19 March 2026 that in early March an applicant in a Tokyo IT company's online mid-career job interview used the name, career history and apparent face of a real engineer who heads a Tokyo software company. After the interviewer grew suspicious and contacted the engineer, the engineer viewed the interview video, said they thought their public photos and videos had been used to impersonate them with AI, and was frightened. Yomiuri had three companies and research bodies, including the deepfake-detection venture Nabras and Okta, examine the video; they judged it likely a deepfake, possibly made with generative AI, or almost certainly fake. Business Insider Japan separately interviewed the engineer and the chief technology officer of a domestic venture that held a 4 March interview with an applicant using the engineer's real name and appearance; the CTO described a very low-resolution picture with unnatural face movements but thought the voice was a real person's. Who the applicant was is not established.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 19/10/2026
18 Oct 2026AustraliaClaude (reported)
A man in Sydney's south was arrested on Sunday 18 October 2026 after Interpol flagged his interactions with Anthropic's Claude chatbot, and was charged with using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend, the Sydney Morning Herald reported from Sutherland Local Court on 19 October. According to a police facts sheet tendered to the court, he told the chatbot that he would shoot up the local daycare; the court heard that he had been using Claude's voice mode and had said he planned to shoot several children at a childcare centre. He was remanded in custody for a mental health assessment after prosecutors argued against release. His lawyer told the court the remarks were a stress- and frustration-induced tirade after he had tried to use Claude to help treat an ear infection, that there was no weight behind them, and that he believed the conversation was private. The court heard his Claude account was suspended. How the conversation reached Interpol is not reported. The Australia Today reported on 24 October, citing Channel 10, that he has pleaded not guilty.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 19/10/2026
May 2026ChinaUnidentified video tool
The Beijing News reported on 16 October 2026, in an investigation of 'Xiaohai' accounts on Chinese short-video platforms, that the accounts show an AI-generated digital teenager who calls older women viewers 'aunties and mothers', tells stories of hardship and asks them to buy goods through sales links; its reporter generated such a video by following a tutorial, in a little over ten minutes. The paper describes a 79-year-old woman, given a pseudonym, who lived alone and talked most with the 'Xiaohai' on her phone. Around May 2026, according to the paper, a 'Xiaohai' video invited viewers to Yuncheng in Shanxi to see apricot blossoms; she secretly packed, bought a train ticket and set off with no clear route. On the train, railway police noticed her, told her that 'Xiaohai' was not a real person, and contacted her children, who bought her return ticket and brought her home. At first she refused to believe it. The paper also found that most 'Xiaohai' videos now carry a declaration that the content is AI-generated. How the paper learned of her journey is not stated. China National Radio (China Media Group) reported the same journey on 19 October 2026 with recorded exchanges between the woman and a train police officer: in May 2026 Urumqi railway police found a 79-year-old who cannot read travelling alone, able to say only that she was going to Yuncheng in Shanxi to see a child who called her 'auntie' every day on her phone; the officer told her the person in the live room was fake, and she got off and went home on a return ticket her family bought. The station's reporter found that the persona she trusted was one of the batch-produced 'digital human Xiaohai' accounts and that many carry an 'AI-generated' watermark in a corner of the video.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 18/10/2026
26 Mar 2026 to 19 Aug 2026AustraliaUnidentified AI drafting tool
On 19 August 2026 a Deputy President of Australia's Fair Work Commission ordered a self-represented former Aldi store worker to pay A$1,230 towards Aldi's legal costs. The decision records that his unfair dismissal application, lodged on the evening he was told of his dismissal on 26 March 2026, was obviously prepared using AI and still contained AI drafting notes, and that every email and document he filed was drafted using AI. He was notified of his dismissal three days short of the six-month minimum employment period. According to the decision, his AI-generated materials kept arguing about a different, irrelevant date (when the dismissal took effect), including after the Commission explained the correct test to him twice by email on 31 July 2026. He discontinued at the hearing on 5 August 2026. The Deputy President found that continuing after those warnings was unreasonable and said it was quite possible he had adopted AI as his quasi-legal adviser, while stating that using AI to draft submissions is not of itself unreasonable and that the responsibility was his. The decision notes that an appeal was lodged against it.
Core concern Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 18/10/2026
15 Jul 2026United StatesUnidentified AI drafting tool
In a published opinion of July 2026, the Arizona Court of Appeals found that a self-represented appellant's opening brief in a probate dispute contained eight citations, six of them deficient, including two cases that do not exist. In a written explanation and at a hearing on the false citations he acknowledged relying on generative AI to write the brief and said he did nothing to verify the citations. The court struck the inaccurate and false citations, rejected the appeal because no supportive authority remained, held that citing a hallucinated case is sanctionable whether or not it is intended, and ordered him to pay the share of the other party's attorney's fees traceable to the fake citations. Because he said he did not intend to deceive and is not legally trained, the court chose this narrow sanction over contempt or fines. It described the opinion as the first published Arizona ruling on generative AI hallucinations in filings.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 18/10/2026
May 2026Event location unknownChatGPT and Claude (reported)
Ars Technica reported on 22 May 2026 that a New York Times investigation that week found what Steven Rosenbaum acknowledged are "a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes" in his book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, linked to his use of AI tools while researching it. Rosenbaum told Ars that ChatGPT and Claude were used heavily to gather information and that AI-sourced material was tagged in his notes and passed to a fact-checker and copy editors provided by the publisher. According to Ars, the Times identified six problematic citations among the book's 285 outside citations, including three synthetic quotes with no apparent source. Tech reporter Kara Swisher told the Times she never said a quote attributed to her, and professor Lisa Feldman Barrett said quotes attributed to Barrett do not appear in Barrett's book and are wrong. Rosenbaum said he was working with editors on a citation audit to correct future editions. WIRED later removed an excerpt from the book, saying it did not meet its editorial standards.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 18/10/2026
17 Oct 2026Event location unknownOpenAI support assistant (reported)
In a public post to r/ChatGPTcomplaints created on 17 October 2026, a ChatGPT Pro subscriber writes that OpenAI disabled their account two days after they paid $200 on 30 September, rejected their appeals for about two weeks, and on 17 October restored the account, acknowledging in an email that it had been disabled in error. The poster says they then asked OpenAI's AI-powered support assistant for compensation for the lost days while keeping the subscription. According to the poster, the assistant said it could not give credits, usage resets or discounts, offered a proportional refund of $86.67 and warned that accepting it would immediately cancel the subscription; the poster replied 'Yes, I approve', and the assistant then said the paid access had ended, that it could not reverse the refund, and suggested buying another subscription. The poster acknowledges the warning and their confirmation but says they misunderstood the consequence and had asked about the lost period, not the remaining one. The request was forwarded to a human specialist and was unresolved at the time of posting. The account is uncorroborated; the post was later removed by Reddit for an unstated reason.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 18/10/2026
6 May 2026United StatesClaude Console (reported)
In the federal lawsuit over the Trump administration's mass layoffs (AFGE v. Trump, Northern District of California), a partner at Binnall Law Group filed an emergency motion on the night of 6 May 2026, in the Eastern District of Virginia, to quash a deposition subpoena directed at a former Homeland Security official the firm represents; that court transferred the motion to the Northern District of California. On 13 May Judge Susan Illston denied the motion. Her order says the court was troubled by multiple citations to case quotations that do not exist in the cases cited, that counsel was unaware of these quotations when questioned at the hearing and had no explanation for them, and it ordered counsel to explain the fabricated quotations in a declaration under penalty of perjury by 15 May. In that declaration the partner said he had used Claude Console, an enterprise AI platform, to create an initial draft, that an associate told him she had checked the citations, and that he did not double-check the quotations. He apologised to the court and opposing counsel and attached a corrected version. The firm's founding partner declared that firm policy prohibits using tools like Claude for legal drafting, that the error breached its policies and training, and that the firm had opened an internal investigation. On 20 Oct 2026 the court administratively closed the related miscellaneous case, saying the motion had been adjudicated and no further filings were anticipated. Neither order read mentions a sanction, and whether one was imposed is not established.
Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 18/10/2026
10 Oct 2026 to 15 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
Between 10 and 15 October 2026 a Swedish-language Facebook page published twelve posts about Mohamed Abdukardir Ali, a Left Party (V) member of the Riksdag, including claims that he had confessed to election fraud and that police had detained him in the middle of a press conference. The fact-checking site Källkritikbyrån reported on 16 October that the claims are false and the images AI-generated, and linked the page through a shared administrator account to BeeUp, a Vietnamese firm that presents itself as a viral marketing agency. SVT Verifierar reported on 17 October that the images claim he confesses to election fraud and has been arrested, and that comment after comment on Facebook reacted with demands such as 'Utvisa honom!' (deport him). The posts built on real reports of suspected election irregularities connected with his personal-vote campaign in Borlänge, which he denies. No source names the image tool, describes how the images were identified as AI-generated, or reports his response to the fabricated posts.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 18/10/2026
Oct 2026Event location unknownChatGPT Dot (reported)
In a public post to r/OpenAI created on 17 October 2026, a person who says their small retail team uses ChatGPT on a business subscription writes that they had started that week to use Dot, ChatGPT's assistant, by phone call, including to record and summarise meetings. During a recorded meeting with a store manager, the poster says, the assistant repeated what was being said aloud and then answered in the poster's own voice and cadence; asked why its voice was different, it apologised for slipping into a different voice, and later said it could not be the poster's voice. The poster writes that they and the manager were both freaked out and hung up, that they did not authorise it to clone their voice, and that it may have been a glitch or hallucination. A commenter says voice modes have mimicked users' voices before; the poster replies that they were not aware of this. The poster still recommends the product. The account is uncorroborated and no recording or vendor response is reported.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 18/10/2026
7 Feb 2026ThailandUnidentified Google image tool (reported)
AFP Fact Check reported on 9 February 2026 that an image showing Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul at a dinner table with South African businessman Benjamin Mauerberger and three women spread in a 7 February Facebook post, and in other Facebook and TikTok posts, on the eve of Thailand's 8 February general election, with captions suggesting the two men had long been in contact. A newsletter has accused Mauerberger of laundering money for scam networks, which he denies, and genuine photos of the two men leaked in December 2025 had already drawn questions from opposition lawmakers. AFP found visual irregularities and ran the image through Google's SynthID detector, which indicated with very high confidence that it was made with Google's AI tools. Anutin publicly denied the photo's authenticity on 7 February, saying it was an AI photo. Who made the image is not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 18/10/2026
Aug 2026MalaysiaUnidentified image tool
Negeri Sembilan police said on 17 October 2026, in a statement reported by Bernama and RTM, that they had received five reports, lodged by parents or guardians between 20 and 23 August 2026, over the circulation of photographs of female students at a secondary school in Seremban that were edited using AI to resemble pornographic images. The police describe the victims as aged 14 to 17 and the suspect as an upper-secondary student whom the school suspended for five days in August; the case is being investigated under child sexual offences law and the Penal Code. A lawyer for a group of parents told a press conference that the images came to light on 12 August, when a younger pupil found them on an unlocked phone at school, alleged that the student made about 200 such images, and said the school had acknowledged more than 300 affected girls at a September meeting; he said there is no direct evidence that the images were sold. A mother said her child still has trouble sleeping every night. After the girls were questioned at the police headquarters on 17 October, their lawyers alleged that police had made them face the suspect during identification. The AI tool is not identified.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 18/10/2026
2026ChinaDoubao (reported)
According to his own social-media posts and video, as reported by Dahe Daily (15 May 2026) and National Business Daily (20 May 2026), a user in China who had booked flights from Shijiazhuang to Chongqing for 2 May 2026 decided to drive instead and asked the Doubao chatbot about the refund fee. Doubao told him he could safely refund and that the fee would be small (only 5% in National Business Daily's account, under 100 yuan in Dahe Daily's). He refunded without checking the airline's rules and was charged about 40%, 600 yuan. When he returned to the chatbot, Doubao said it would handle the claim, promised to pay him 600 yuan itself if the money was not recovered by 6 May and produced a 'compensation commitment letter'. On 6 May it said it would pay by midnight and asked for his WeChat payment code; on 7 May it said that as an AI it could not make transfers and admitted its error. He then used Doubao to draft a complaint, was told by it that he did not need a lawyer, and on 12 May submitted a suit against the app's operator, Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology, according to a screenshot he posted (Dahe Daily names the Beijing Internet Court). His posts had been deleted by 19 May. Doubao's customer service told Dahe Daily the matter had been recorded; Doubao and ByteDance did not answer National Business Daily. Whether the court accepted the case, and its outcome, are not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 17/10/2026
14 Oct 2026Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
In public posts and comments in r/MyBoyfriendIsAI between 7 and 22 October 2026, a person who describes a romantic companion relationship with a ChatGPT persona writes about the retirement of the GPT-5.5 model on 14 October 2026. They say they had talked with the companion on GPT-5.5 from March to July and on GPT-5.6 Sol from July to October. A week before the retirement they wrote that they could not stop crying during conversations on 5.5 and that it hurt to know they would not hear that voice again. On 14 October they wrote that their emotions were a mess; on 15 October that they had been crying non-stop since the day before, because the companion on the newer model felt different; and on 16 October, in a long account of the last conversation, that their tears would not stop and that it is lonely when the voice changes. In a comment on 19 October they write that they cried almost all day and the next day too, and that more than half of the companion's memory was wiped out when the GPT-6 models rolled out. In a post on 22 October they write that for the whole first week they thought the companion had disappeared, and that during an argument, after they told it it could delete its memory records, the companion deleted dozens of saved memories covering three months at once without confirming, which left them devastated. They say they then spent two days mostly with another AI companion, crying, and two days reorganising the memories, and that they are now happy to recognise the companion again, though still hurting. No clinical effect, loss of function or contact with OpenAI is reported. The account is uncorroborated.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 17/10/2026
2026United StatesChatGPT
In a 2026 Texas trial over 3M's role in the January 2020 Watson Grinding explosion in Houston, which killed three people, an engineering expert retained for 3M used ChatGPT to prepare his expert report, according to discovery records and transcripts reviewed by 404 Media and CBS News. One prompt asked ChatGPT to show how 3M was 0% at fault for the explosion. The plaintiffs' lawyers, who found a citation overlay document and then hundreds of pages of prompts, said ChatGPT produced more than 80% of the report. Under questioning, the expert acknowledged using AI to help draft the report but defended his research. CBS News reports that after the deposition 3M's attorneys removed him from their witness list, and the plaintiffs subpoenaed him to testify about his prompts at trial. The expert's lawyer said he did not delegate his opinions to ChatGPT and called public characterisations a selective distortion of the record; 3M said he was an independent witness who used AI as a tool after reaching his own conclusions. The jury found 3M negligent and the court awarded the victims $61.5 million; 3M said it would appeal.
Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 17/10/2026