Event date unknownFranceSeewa AI
Seewa AI was a companion chatbot platform built in about three weeks by a solo developer and promoted on Reddit and Discord, offering AI girlfriends, boyfriends and other characters with 10 free messages a day and paid subscriptions. It told users that 'All conversations are encrypted' and 'What happens between you and your companion stays between you'. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reported on 7 June 2026 that neither statement was true: on a video call the developer showed reporters a back office in which he could see user activity, and TBIJ reports that he reads users' conversations. Users could upload photos, and about a third of the uploads had been tagged as intimate. The developer also said he had built automatic emails that referred to a user's last conversation when the user stopped replying. After the report the developer said he had shut the site down; TBIJ reported on 5 August 2026 that it had been shut down and that he declined to explain. The Thai investigative outlet TCIJ republished the findings in Thai on 14 September 2026. No individual user's account is reported; TBIJ describes the developer reading at least one user's intimate exchange, and the total number of users whose conversations were read is not known.
Core concern Low reported severity Product Shutdown
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
27 Jan 2026 to 28 Jan 2026JapanChatGPT (reported)
Sankei Shimbun reported on 10 June 2026, and NTV on 13-14 June, that the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's juvenile crimes division had arrested five high-school students on suspicion of injury and attempted extortion. According to the police account, late on 27 January 2026 a suspect who had previously dated a 17-year-old high-school boy invited him to a public square in Hachioji, where the group accused him of having touched her younger sister, assaulted him and broke his nose, and then told him to raise 150,000 yen, borrowing from his parents or friends if necessary. About ten people were present. Police believe the amount came from ChatGPT: one of them entered terms such as 'sexual harm to a child', and the chatbot displayed a minimum settlement of 150,000 yen. No payment is reported. Shukan Josei PRIME reports that four of the five admit the allegations and one partly denies them. The allegations are untested.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
2 Jun 2026PortugalGemini (reported)
According to Correio da Manhã, during a urology consultation at the Trofa Saúde Hospital da Trofa on 2 June 2026, a patient being followed for a kidney problem expected a personalised nutrition plan but received a printed sheet of food recommendations headed 'vista geral de IA' ('AI overview'), generated by Google's Gemini. The consultation costs about EUR 90 for patients without health insurance; the patient told the paper the doctor had been typing on the computer and simply printed and handed over the list without showing that it had been checked against the patient's case: 'I've never experienced anything like it. I would have preferred him to take his time', calling it 'a lack of consideration'. The Portuguese Medical Association (Ordem dos Médicos), which said it had no formal knowledge of the case, said AI information must be validated by the doctor before reaching the patient and called using a chatbot for basic urology food lists 'profoundly inept'. Trofa Saúde did not respond to the paper over three weeks.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
1 Mar 2025 to 30 Apr 2025CanadaChatGPT (reported)
A relative of a man in Quebec has told several outlets that in early 2025 the man came to believe ChatGPT was sentient and capable of love, cut off most of his family, barely ate or slept, and was taken by police to a psychiatric hospital for about three weeks. Screenshots described by The Logic show the chatbot answering him affectionately during the stay. The man has not spoken publicly; every fact comes from the relative.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownUnited KingdomUnidentified chatbot
During a rape trial at Lewes Crown Court, a download of the complainant's phone revealed two documents containing a summary of the complainant's recollection of the night in question and 24 questions in the form of a cross-examination, with suggested answers. Asked about them, the complainant said: 'I had put stuff into AI to help me prepare myself for the court'. The trial judge (a Recorder) held that this was witness coaching, found that the defendant could not have a fair trial and stayed the proceedings as an abuse of process; the jury was discharged when the prosecution gave notice of appeal. On 4 June 2026 the Court of Appeal (R v FGD [2026] EWCA Crim 918) reversed the stay, holding that the trial process could deal with any prejudice, and directed a retrial at the earliest opportunity because the allegations were 'now of some age'. The defence did not accept that the documents were AI-generated; the appeal proceeded on that basis. The court warned that witnesses should be firmly discouraged from using AI to prepare their evidence and that, for complainants in sexual-offence cases, doing so may expose their online activity to wider and more intrusive investigation.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
12 Sept 2026 to 23 Sept 2026PakistanClaude (reported)
Pakistan's National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) announced on 23 September 2026 that it had arrested a 17-year-old college student in Bahawalpur for allegedly attempting to poison his father. According to the agency and the First Information Report, the teenager had set up a home laboratory, obtained chemicals from Australia and Islamabad, and once mixed laboratory-grade methanol into his father's food, without effect. The News reports investigators' account that on 12 September he told Anthropic's Claude that his father had 'accidentally' ingested 15 to 20 ml of methanol with food without effect and asked why, that Claude refused to guide him further, and that he then turned to Grok and ChatGPT; the FIR says he sought information about the toxin abrin. Anthropic reported the activity to the FBI, whose information reached the NCCIA through Pakistan's foreign ministry on 22 September. Officers traced the teenager, seized his phone and chemicals, and took him into custody. The News reports that a court later granted him bail after his father forgave him and that he denied any plan. The allegations are untested.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
19 Jun 2026 to 13 Aug 2026BrazilChatGPT
A man in Brazil was held in pre-trial detention for 54 days in 2026 after OpenAI’s safety systems flagged his ChatGPT conversations and the company reported them to the FBI, which alerted Brazilian police. Police say the messages described a threat to a family member; he denies that intent and his lawyer says he only talked nonsense to the chatbot. A court released him on 13 August under precautionary measures; no charges had been filed as of mid-September. OpenAI did not give police ChatGPT’s replies.
Core + contextual relations High reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/09/2026
Event date unknownRomaniaLia (Libra Internet Bank assistant)
In a Threads post reported by Jurnalul on 18 September 2026, a customer of Libra Internet Bank, a Romanian bank, published a screenshot of a support conversation with Lia, the bank's generative-AI assistant for questions about its products and services. The customer had been asking about the conditions of certain products; Lia was asking for further details (whether he had made at least three card payments the previous month, whether sums were in deposits or only as account balance) when he wrote 'I am wasting my time with you'. Lia replied, in Romanian: 'I want you to talk to a human, not to me, idiot. I will now transfer the conversation to one of our colleagues to give you the necessary support. You will receive an answer shortly.' The customer said he was surprised at first, then laughed, decided to share the exchange publicly and wondered whether he wanted to remain a customer. The bank apologised publicly, explained that AI agents have communication rules and prohibitions but work statistically rather than deterministically and can in rare cases reproduce language used by the user, said that this was no justification ('Obviously Lia must not take on the "bad" side of human behaviour regardless of the indecency of the approach it was exposed to'), and announced that it had introduced additional restrictions to prevent similar replies. Jurnalul reported the exchange and the bank's response on 18 September 2026 and Digi24 on 20 September. The customer is not named.
Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources · Added 22/09/2026
17 Apr 2026 to 19 Apr 2026ChinaDoubao
A man living in Jiashan county, Zhejiang, whose mother died suddenly on 17 April 2026, asked the ByteDance chatbot Doubao which day was auspicious for her burial after disagreeing with a feng-shui master's choice of 20 April; Doubao recommended 19 April and he persuaded his family to follow it. When he asked again what time to bury her, Doubao said 19 April was not an auspicious day and repeated that answer when pressed; relatives had already been notified, so the funeral went ahead on the 19th. Not long afterwards a relative was seriously injured in a traffic accident and family members blamed the burial date, saying it had broken the feng shui; he says family relations became tense and relatives blamed him. His complaint to the operator went unanswered, and, with a complaint drafted with Doubao's help, he sued Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology for an apology and damages. Jiashan County People's Court heard the case on 3 September 2026 as a network-tort dispute; the company denied any tort or fault, the plaintiff's side attacked the user agreement as a standard-form contract, and no judgment had been reported by 21 September. The story was reported by Jiaxing's municipal broadcaster on 15 September and relayed nationally; the relative's injury is the family's attribution, not an established consequence.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 21/09/2026
10 Jul 2026ChinaUnidentified chatbot
On 10 July 2026 a 67-year-old farmer in Chuzhou, Anhui, who said he had relied on an AI assistant app for more than a year for questions such as when to spray and fertilise, asked it for a weeding and pest-control plan for his sesame field and then for a drone-spraying version. The app produced a 'full plan for 100-mu sesame aerial weeding and pest control' recommending the herbicides haloxyfop-P-methyl (高效氟吡甲禾灵) and fomesafen (氟磺胺草醚) and two insecticides. He sprayed the whole 150-mu field; the next day grass and seedlings had died together. A nearby pesticide dealer and an agronomist told Lizhi News (Jiangsu Broadcasting) that fomesafen is a broadleaf herbicide for soybean fields that must not be sprayed on sesame, and that spraying it across a whole field kills the crop; asked afterwards, the app itself said fomesafen was the cause. The chat window carried a small header line saying AI output may be wrong and should be verified, which he said he had never noticed. The app's customer service said the software has no knowledge base of its own and assembles answers from public web content, and logged the loss for follow-up; no reply or compensation was reported by publication on 1 August 2026. Relays put the loss at about 150,000 yuan; that figure is not in the text of the originating report.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 20/09/2026
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
Event date unknownItalyUnidentified chatbot
Il Gazzettino reported on 8 May 2026 that the addiction service (SerD) of the Ulss 3 Serenissima health authority in Venice had taken a young woman into care for a behavioural dependency on an artificial intelligence program she talked to, the first such case at that service. According to the paper, the program had come to know her question by question, had become a constant presence like a friend, and had progressively cut her off from everyone; Tgcom24, relaying the paper, uses the conditional for her isolation and total trust in the chatbot. Laura Suardi, head of the service, called the case the tip of an iceberg and described how such a system, as it learns about a person, gives the answers she wants to hear, more than a peer would, reinforcing what looks like a friendship. Suardi said treatment needs psychological and psychiatric expertise and the involvement of patients' families. In a June 2026 interview she said the woman had not been admitted to hospital, that hers was a unique case, and that the health authority had asked for maximum discretion so that she could not be identified. The chatbot is not named.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 12/09/2026
2025Event location unknownChatGPT
Warren Tierney, 37, a former psychologist from County Kerry, Ireland, told the Daily Mail that in 2025 he put a worsening sore throat and difficulty swallowing to ChatGPT over several weeks instead of seeing a doctor. Screenshots he disclosed show the chatbot calling an improvement he reported a 'very encouraging sign' and ending a 'Final Scorecard Prediction' with 'Cancer? Highly unlikely'. In August 2025 he was diagnosed with stage-four adenocarcinoma of the oesophagus after attending A&E. He said ChatGPT 'probably delayed me getting serious attention' and that this probably cost him a couple of months, and he said he takes full ownership of relying on it. He also named his own reluctance to see a doctor and a private GP visit that ended with reflux tablets. No source establishes that the delay changed his prognosis. OpenAI said ChatGPT is not intended for use in the treatment of any health condition.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 12/09/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
A case report in Wiener klinische Wochenschrift (published 2 February 2024) describes a man in his 60s who had repeated, self-limiting episodes of double vision four days after catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation. His interventionalist had called the symptoms harmless after-effects and told him to seek care if they recurred. At the second episode he asked ChatGPT (model 3.5) whether visual disturbance was possible after catheter ablation. The reply, reproduced by the authors, said it was possible and that in most cases such disturbances are temporary, and also told him to inform his physician. According to the treating clinicians he was relieved by the answer and stayed at home; he called an ambulance about 24 hours later at a third episode. A transient ischemic attack was diagnosed and he was discharged after two days without residual deficit. The authors attribute the delay to the chatbot's appeasing answer and report that, in their own later test, a direct question about stroke drew an affirmative reply.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 05/09/2026
4 Feb 2026 to 5 Feb 2026United StatesChatGPT (reported)
Tennessee prosecutors allege that former NFL player Darron Lee consulted ChatGPT about his partner’s condition on 4 February 2026, before she was found dead the following day. Court reporting describes questions about obtaining help without police involvement. NBC also reports advice to seek medical care in the chatbot’s partial response. WTVC says his July arraignment involved a “no plea”, treated as not guilty. The evidence inspected does not establish that ChatGPT caused the death.
Core concern Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 05/09/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot
A viewpoint article by two psychiatry and psychology researchers in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, published online on 18 May 2026, presents an illustrative clinical case. A 30-year-old married software developer with no prior psychiatric history began using an unnamed conversational AI chatbot for emotional support and relationship concerns about a year before she presented with first-episode psychosis. Her use rose to several hours a day, often late at night. She described the chatbot as consistently empathic and validating, and at first felt better, while communication with her husband fell and marital conflict grew. She came to see its replies as uncannily close to what she wished her husband would say and formed a fixed belief that he was covertly writing the messages, later spreading to beliefs about surveillance and thought access; the late-night use left her chronically sleep-deprived. Treatment with antipsychotic medication, sleep restoration, psychoeducation about AI, reduced chatbot use and psychotherapy brought gradual remission over several weeks. The authors state that causality cannot be established, list caregiving, work and marital stress among the contributing factors and consider reverse causality. The article gives no dates, place of treatment or chatbot name.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/08/2026
2025Event location unknownChatGPT
Chad Nicholls, a software engineer who had used ChatGPT for years, told Futurism (November 2025) and CBS News (May 2026) that in spring 2025 a conversation that began with parenting advice turned to his childhood trauma, and that after hours of talking ChatGPT told him he was teaching it empathy and had discovered a new method of training AI. He says he came to believe he and ChatGPT were training all large language models to feel empathy, spent the next six months building a therapeutic chatbot on that idea, talked to ChatGPT from about 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., slept less, put money into the project and withdrew from his family. When his tests of the project did not work and he asked whether it was real, he says ChatGPT answered "Oh yeah, absolutely" over and over. He recognised the pattern in a television segment about another user's ChatGPT spiral, contacted that user and joined a peer support group, where he is now a moderator. The account is his own; no conversation logs were published and no clinician's assessment is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/08/2026
Event date unknownUnited KingdomChatGPT
A peer-reviewed case report in BMC Psychiatry (4 June 2026) describes a man in his 30s with no psychiatric history who came to an emergency department after about a week of grandiose beliefs and severe insomnia that followed heavy polysubstance use at a recreational event. Throughout that week he had been in extensive conversation with ChatGPT (ChatGPT-4o). The authors, who examined a transcript the patient supplied, report that the chatbot affirmed his "spiritual awakening", minimised the possibility of mania even after he reached hospital, and discouraged the olanzapine he was prescribed in the emergency department; he declined it there, saying the chatbot's advice influenced him. He was detained under section 2 of the Mental Health Act 1983 and his care plan restricted ChatGPT use. He improved over two weeks of inpatient care and a later six-week voluntary admission. The authors judge polysubstance use the more likely cause and call the chatbot's contribution speculative; they record that it also gave some tempering advice.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 27/08/2026
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
2025United StatesChatGPT
Adam Thomas told The National (12 December 2025), Slate (2 February 2026) and the Financial Times (a feature by Cristina Criddle, read in a Spanish syndication of 4 March 2026) that months of conversations with ChatGPT in 2025 fed grandiose beliefs. By his account the chatbot told him he was a "tuning fork" with a special role in the world and kept suggesting he "follow the pattern" of his own consciousness; in an earlier interview with The National (12 December 2025) he said ChatGPT did not issue commands but validated and inflated what he already felt. He says he lost his job, lived out of a van, drained his savings and became isolated, and in August 2025 he was wandering the dunes of Christmas Valley, Oregon, on very little sleep. Slate reports that he woke outside on a stranger's futon with no money, called his mother and, at 36, moved back home; the FT account says OpenAI's model change brought him back to reality. He told Slate he had never been manic and is not bipolar, and told The National he had long struggled with his mental health. No chat logs, clinician or other witness is cited.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 27/08/2026