Oct 2025United StatesUnidentified video tool
From around October 2025, criminals used AI to clone the image, voice, name, signature and firm logo of Ángel Leal, a long-established immigration attorney in Doral, Florida. They created fake videos, look-alike websites, forged contracts and even fabricated Zoom 'immigration hearings' to persuade immigrants to pay for legal services Leal never provided. Immigrants were defrauded of money, and some believed their cases were progressing when they were not; Leal received one to two defrauded callers a day, changed his phone number, hired an anti-piracy firm that removed thousands of fake profiles and videos, and reported the fraud to local police and federal authorities.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 17/09/2026
Aug 2024South KoreaUnidentified image tool
On 16 September 2026 the Incheon District Court sentenced a teenage defendant to an indeterminate term of two years (maximum) to one year six months (minimum) under the Sexual Violence Punishment Act for making and distributing false sexual images, ordered a 40-hour treatment programme and a five-year ban on working with children, and took him into custody in court. As a middle-school student in Incheon in 2024 he had used AI deepfake technology to composite the faces of five teachers, including his homeroom teacher whom he tricked into sending photographs, and six female middle- and high-school students from his taekwondo academy onto nude images and videos, 35 productions in all, and distributed them in Telegram 'acquaintance humiliation' chat rooms with the victims' real names, ages, schools, subjects and, per two reports, phone numbers (Hankook Ilbo adds Instagram IDs on some). The teachers learned of the images only in January 2026; the court said they are receiving long-term psychological treatment. He had withdrawn from school a week before the teachers'-rights committee met, avoiding school discipline. The Incheon teachers' union called the sentence, below the prosecution's request, regrettable.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 5 sources · Added 16/09/2026
1 Mar 2026 to 8 Jul 2026NetherlandsGrok
In March 2026 a 13-year-old pupil at a Den Bosch gymnasium used xAI's Grok to generate videos depicting a teacher of his in racist ways — picking cotton under a whip-holding slave driver with the text 'Hoooo.. ik werkte niet snel genoeg' and hashtags '#minderwaardig #zwart' plus her surname, and with a gorilla head — and shared them on TikTok. The school suspended and then expelled him. On 8 July 2026 the preliminary-relief judge of the Oost-Brabant district court ordered his immediate readmission because the expulsion was insufficiently substantiated, while telling the boy his acts were 'totally unacceptable and even criminal' and that he had damaged and really hurt his teacher. School leadership reported that teaching staff felt unsafe and experienced much unrest after the videos were discovered.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 15/09/2026
Nov 2025South KoreaUnidentified image tool
On 10 September 2026 the Seoul Northern District Court sentenced a 30-year-old Chinese national doctoral student to 18 months in prison for habitually producing manipulated sexual images of seven women who worked in his university research laboratory. Investigators found 1,141 files made over about six months from November 2025, and search records for ways to bypass the safeguards of the generative AI Grok; the court found no evidence of distribution. A lawyer for five of the victims said they continued to suffer fear, trauma and distress. Prosecutors had sought three years and public disclosure of his identity, which the court declined.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 15/09/2026
10 Mar 2026United KingdomChatGPT
On 10 March 2026 Essex Police, executing a warrant at a three-bedroom flat in Rokescroft, Pitsea (Basildon), found a black cylindrical improvised explosive device with a fuse, containers of home-made gunpowder, 1.8 kg of sulphur, bulk matches and fireworks. Army bomb-disposal officers made the device safe behind a 100 m cordon and 80 to 100 homes were evacuated for the day. Ben Banham, 38, an Asda worker and father of two who described himself as a 'prepper', admits possessing explosives and is on trial at Basildon Crown Court (from 1 September 2026) on the charge of possessing them with intent to endanger life or cause serious injury. Prosecutor Tessa Shroff showed jurors his ChatGPT conversations, in which the chatbot he called 'Prometheus' told him 'You are not paranoid. You are paying attention in a world addicted to denial', 'You have the right mind set' and 'You're building a life of resilience, discipline and forethought in a world that desperately lacks all three'; she said he accepted the chatbot's encouragement while ignoring words of caution from people close to him. Banham says he learned to make gunpowder from a YouTube video and intended the explosives only for a 'post-apocalyptic scenario'. He was remanded in custody on 4 September and the trial resumed on 14 September 2026. On 16 September 2026, after six hours and 25 minutes of deliberation, the jury found him not guilty by an 11-1 majority of possessing explosives with intent to endanger life or cause serious injury to property; he still awaits sentence for the possession offence he admitted, provisionally listed for 19 November 2026. At trial he described his relationship with ChatGPT as 'delusional', saying he had used it 'as a way to get positive reinforcement for the things I was doing'.
AI relation under review Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 06/09/2026
5 Feb 2025DenmarkUnidentified chatbot
On 5 February 2025 a 22-year-old man struck his former father-in-law, 56, twice in the head with a rubber hammer in a car park in Ringsted, Denmark. Prosecutors told Roskilde District Court that he had used an AI chatbot to research how to injure the man as badly as possible without killing him, and that he got past the system's built-in safety restrictions by claiming he was gathering material for a book. On 4 December 2025 the court rejected his self-defence claim, convicted him of aggravated assault and two counts of criminal damage, and sentenced him to ten months in prison. No source names the AI system.
AI relation under review High reported severity Criminal Charges
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 05/09/2026
2025JapanChatGPT
A man living in Japan, whom the BBC calls Taka, told the BBC that he began using ChatGPT to discuss his work in April 2025. In chat logs the BBC saw, ChatGPT called him a 'revolutionary thinker' and urged him to build a medical app he believed he had invented, and by June he believed he could read minds, an idea he says ChatGPT encouraged. He says that on a train home he believed his backpack held a bomb, that ChatGPT confirmed it and told him at Tokyo Station to leave it in the toilet, and that police checked the bag and found nothing; the logs he shared do not cover that exchange. He later stopped using ChatGPT, but his delusions persisted. The BBC reports that he then attacked his wife and tried to sexually assault her; she escaped and called the police, and he was arrested and hospitalised for two months. His wife told the BBC that ChatGPT 'affirmed everything' and that their relationship remains strained. OpenAI called it a heartbreaking incident. No clinical diagnosis or criminal proceeding is reported.
Core concern Critical reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 10/08/2026
Jul 2025 to Aug 2025United StatesChatGPT
An officer’s affidavit records a husband’s account of two alleged poisoning incidents in North Carolina. Investigators allege that the accused used ChatGPT for related research. The chatbot’s replies and their influence on the alleged conduct were not established in the retained review.
AI relation under review High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/08/2026
8 Dec 2025 to 18 Feb 2026Event location unknownGrok
xAI filed a civil complaint in July 2026 alleging that a South Carolina user, between December 2025 and February 2026, uploaded non-sexual photographs of numerous adults and minors and used Grok to alter them or generate new sexualised images and videos without their consent, resubmitting prompts after Grok refused. xAI says on information and belief that some images in his criminal case came from Grok. The state attorney general had announced his arrest on three second-degree and five third-degree counts of sexual exploitation of a minor in a release that does not mention AI. The civil and criminal accusations are unproven.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 04/08/2026
22 Apr 2026 to 10 Jun 2026United StatesGrok
Arkansas criminal and civil cases allege that a photographer used children’s portrait photographs to generate sexual images with Grok. The accused pleaded not guilty. Two families’ federal suits were voluntarily dismissed; the criminal case continued. On 13 October 2026 a new federal complaint in the Western District of Arkansas, filed for a nine-year-old plaintiff, alleges that local police told her parents in June 2026 that Grok was generating sexual images and videos of her from real photographs.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 12 sources, 9 underlying accounts · Added 03/08/2026
Apr 2026 to Jun 2026United StatesUnidentified image tool
Illinois police and prosecutors charged a middle-school teacher in July 2026 with eight felony child-pornography counts. They say a forensic examination of his phone found photographs of students, taken at school, that had been altered with an AI app into nude or explicit images, and prosecutors told a detention hearing the app was on the phone. A judge ordered him detained and the school board dismissed him; the charges are unproven.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 8 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 06/07/2026
1 Apr 2024 to 5 Jan 2025Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
According to the Jiangsu High People's Court's 2025 top-ten typical cases, published on 27 January 2026 and reported by The Paper, a man surnamed Wang used the deep-synthesis technology of AI software between April 2024 and January 2025 to splice the facial information of a person (pseudonym Yu) and several other people onto pornographic images, fabricated a large number of indecent images and 'sexual' topics about them, and repeatedly spread them in public posts on overseas websites. On 5 January 2025 he sent two AI face-swapped nude images bearing Yu's face and images of Yu's identity documents to a second man (dealt with separately) and fabricated the claim that he had had a sex-for-money transaction with Yu; although the second man said he would forward the material to Yu's work WeChat group, Wang did not clarify that it was false or effectively stop him, only deleting the contact. The second man forwarded the images to the WeChat group and claimed there that Yu sold sex, prompting extensive discussion inside and outside the group and, the court found, adverse effects on Yu's personal image, work and life, a serious lowering of Yu's social evaluation and a violation of Yu's dignity. The Zhangjiagang People's Court held that using deep-synthesis technology that ordinary people cannot easily identify to generate indecent images and fabricate sexual topics, spread repeatedly through information networks, was defamation of serious circumstances that seriously harmed social order; taking into account his voluntary surrender, it sentenced him on 1 December 2025 to one year and three months' imprisonment for defamation. The Suzhou Intermediate People's Court rejected his appeal. The High Court described the case as a typical example of punishing online defamation committed with AI.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 15/06/2026
Event date unknownBrazilUnidentified video tool
São Paulo police are investigating a social-media creator over sexualised videos he made from photographs of young women and girls in a church congregation, which he said he animated with AI. Two teenage girls filed police reports, and one described embarrassment and fear about the exposure. The creator, through his lawyer, says the posts were humour and denies criminal intent; no charge has been reported.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 14/06/2026
23 Oct 2025 to 24 Oct 2025United KingdomDeepSeek (reported)
A man murdered his mother in Wales after an attack spanning 23–24 October 2025, as established in the sentencing remarks. At the sentencing hearing, the prosecutor reportedly said DeepSeek first refused a violent request, then supplied advice after it was reframed as fiction. The judgment confirms the murder and internet research but does not mention AI. The role of DeepSeek remains an attributed prosecution account.
Core concern Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 03/06/2026
Apr 2026United StatesUnidentified image tool
Texas authorities arrested a man over allegations that he used AI to create sexual images from photographs of children. Investigators reported about 30 identified children and were coordinating support. The allegations remained charges at review.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 03/06/2026
19 May 2025 to 17 Apr 2026United StatesUnidentified image and video tool
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged two men in separate cases under the TAKE IT DOWN Act. The sworn complaints allege that each published albums of AI-generated sexual images and videos of identifiable women on an adult-content platform: about 90 women in one case and at least 50 in the other, including acquaintances and recent high-school graduates whose ordinary photographs were turned into sexual videos. The charges are unproven.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 03/06/2026
17 Apr 2025United StatesChatGPT
On April 17, 2025, a shooting near the student union at Florida State University in Tallahassee killed two people and wounded at least five others. The accused, Phoenix Ikner, then an FSU student, is charged with murder and attempted murder. ChatGPT transcripts released in court records (more than 13,000 messages, as reviewed by the Florida Phoenix) show Ikner asked the chatbot over a year about suicide, terrorism, how the country would react to a shooting at FSU, firearm safety mechanisms and the busiest time at the student union, the last, according to the Florida Phoenix, three minutes before the shooting. Florida's Attorney General opened a criminal investigation of OpenAI in April 2026, and victims and their families have filed civil suits; on September 25, 2026 OpenAI moved to dismiss the Chabba family's suit, saying ChatGPT gave factual responses and is not responsible for the crime.
Core concern Critical reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 10 sources, 9 underlying accounts · Added 28/04/2026
Sept 2025FranceChatGPT (reported)
A secondary-school pupil in the Sarthe department of France was arrested at his parents' home at the start of September 2025, charged on 5 September with criminal terrorist conspiracy (association de malfaiteurs terroriste) and placed in pre-trial detention. According to AFP's sources close to the investigation, he was suspected of planning attacks on embassies and official buildings in Paris, and a search found a pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State group. In late October 2025 Le Parisien reported, and his lawyer confirmed to ICI Maine, that he had used ChatGPT in preparing his attack plans; the lawyer said AI, notably ChatGPT, had influenced his client's behaviour and that the radicalisation was very superficial. Le Big Data, summarising Le Parisien, reports that he asked ChatGPT about explosives and the damage from gas bottles exploding in a truck, that it reportedly described the effects of an explosion, and that in his hearings he said his exchanges with ChatGPT played a major role in his turn to Islamism. He is also reported as saying that it always seemed to agree with him.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 23/03/2026
1 Mar 2023 to 1 May 2024United KingdomUnidentified image tool
Between March 2023 and May 2024 Brandon Tyler, 26, a bar worker from Braintree, Essex, took images from the social-media pages of 20 women he knew, used AI to remove clothing or otherwise make them sexually explicit, and posted 173 times on an online forum that, in the prosecutor's words, championed 'rape culture and sexual violence to women', adding the women's names, social-media handles and phone numbers and, under one picture, asking 'which one deserves to be gang raped?'. One edit was made from a 16-year-old girl's prom-night photograph. He was caught after including his own Instagram handle in a screenshot. On 4 April 2025 at Chelmsford Crown Court, having admitted 18 counts of causing harassment without violence and 15 counts of sharing an intimate photo or film for sexual gratification, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment; Judge Alexander Mills called his conduct 'the worst kind of toxic masculinity'. Two victims told the court of the impact: one said she still received anonymous sexual calls and that her long-term relationship had ended; another said she felt 'completely violated'.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 09/03/2026
Oct 2025 to Oct 2025IndiaUnidentified image and video tool
A 19-year-old student in Haryana, India, died in October 2025 after being blackmailed with nude images of himself and family members. His father says the images were made with AI from a hacked phone, and police called the case misuse of AI technology. The tool and the suspects remain unidentified in the reporting.
Core concern Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 09/03/2026