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
2025Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
A civil court in Goiânia, Brazil (32ª Vara Cível) ordered Telegram in a judgment signed on 6 October 2026 to pay R$10,000 in moral damages to a woman whose fake intimate images, created with artificial intelligence, were shared on the platform. According to the judgment as reported by Portal 6 (citing the legal news site Rota Jurídica) and O Popular, Telegram users used AI tools to alter photos that she and her sisters had posted on social media into nude and sexual images, and shared them without consent in a group of more than 120 participants with offensive sexual comments. She reported the group to Telegram through its support channels, including a notification on 29 July 2025, and received no reply; the group had 98 participants then and at least 123 a month later. The court held Telegram liable because it did not remove the posts after notification, ordered removal of the material, measures to block identical or similar copies, and disclosure of data identifying the group's creators and users. Telegram did not contest the case and did not answer O Popular.
Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · 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
21 Oct 2025 to 3 Apr 2026United StatesCoCounsel
In a published opinion of 3 April 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit addressed the briefs a lawyer appointed under the Criminal Justice Act had filed for an indigent defendant appealing a sentencing enhancement in a drug-trafficking case. The court noticed that the principal brief's file name was 'CoCounsel Skill Results' and found three quotations that appear in no legal authority and misstatements of two precedents. The lawyer admitted that a staff member had used Westlaw's CoCounsel to create the first draft, that he repeated the process for the reply, and that the false quotations came from artificial intelligence he did not verify. The court denied him compensation for the appeal, referred the opinion for possible disciplinary proceedings and to the Kentucky Bar Association, and by separate order removed him, locked his briefs and ordered replacement counsel to file new ones, which it said further delayed resolution of the defendant's appeal. The court acknowledged his candour and his 40 years without discipline.
Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 19/10/2026
Jun 2025MalaysiaVeo 3 (reported)
A hotel worker in Perak, Malaysia, said in a Threads post on 30 June 2025 that an elderly couple checking in asked whether she had ridden the cable car at Kuak Hulu, telling her they had travelled from Kuala Lumpur for it. They had seen a nearly three-minute video in which a journalist from a 'TV Rakyat' channel appears to introduce a 'Kuak SkyRide' cable car and interview visitors. The worker says she explained the video was AI-generated; the woman asked why anyone would lie when there was even a reporter in it and said she wanted to sue the journalist, and the couple said they had been too embarrassed to check with their children. The Baling district officer acknowledged that the content was AI-generated, and the acting district police chief said checks found no such cable car and that no report of losses had been received. A Fast Company column says the video carried a Veo3 logo. Who made the video is unknown.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 19/10/2026
14 Jul 2026ChinaUnidentified image tool
China Daily reported on 15 July 2026 that the first prize in a local photography competition in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, had been revoked after the image was found to be AI-generated. Online users had pointed to garbled characters on the workers' vests, unnatural sunlight and matching faces in the winning photo of three sanitation workers. After an investigation, the city's federation of literary and art circles, one of the organisers, confirmed in a notice on Tuesday 14 July that the photo had been created using AI, cancelled its award and barred the work from competitions, evaluations, exhibitions and official archives. The competition was suspended for rectification; the notice said those responsible would be dealt with under the relevant rules and that the case exposed lax vetting and imprecise judging criteria. The entrant is not named, and who generated the image is not stated.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 19/10/2026
2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI system
In a first-person essay published by the Oakland Review of Books on 2 October 2026, a former customer success manager at an education technology company writes that the company began a push at the end of 2025 to become 'AI-first', requiring staff to use AI tools, and that the author was later laid off. The author writes that an hour after the layoff the CEO held a seven-minute all-hands meeting to read a Claude-generated script saying leadership was 'replacing these roles with AI', and that the company let 40 people go, about 20 percent of its workforce, at the end of about six months of role eliminations. Staff who could not attend the HR meeting were told by email that their roles ended the next business day. The author also writes that sales were down and customers were unhappy, and that losing the job brought more relief than anything else, cushioned by savings and an employed partner. The company is not named, and the layoff is not dated beyond the essay's sequence. The account is uncorroborated.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 19/10/2026
Event date unknownPolandUnidentified image and video tool
City police in the Silesian Voivodeship said on 30 April 2026 that they had detained a 30-year-old man suspected of persistently harassing a young woman and threatening her and her family. According to the police, he sent her several to more than a dozen messages a day over a long period, opened new profiles when she blocked him, came to her home, and used artificial intelligence to create videos casting her and her mother in invented scenarios, as well as photos and videos simulating violence against a family member. He was charged with persistent harassment and criminal threats, and a court remanded him in custody for three months. The police do not name the AI tool or say how they established its use.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 19/10/2026
Event date unknownIndiaUnidentified image and video tool
Police in the Chennai area arrested a man in early May 2026 who, according to their investigation as reported by the Times of India, DT Next and Daily Thanthi, used AI to turn a woman colleague's display pictures into obscene images and videos, posted them from a fake Instagram account in her name, and tagged the posts with her home location. A friend alerted the woman to the account; she complained to an all-women police station, and police traced the posts to a colleague's phone. Daily Thanthi reports that he admitted under questioning to making the images with AI after a workplace dispute. DT Next reports that the account and posts were blocked and that he was remanded in judicial custody. The AI tool is not identified, and the date the posts began is not reported.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · 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
Jun 2025PolandUnidentified image tool
In June 2025, according to OKO.press, a group of pupils at a primary school in central Poland took a classmate's photo from the internet, used an application that offers to "undress" people in uploaded photos to generate a nude image bearing her face, posted it on the school's Instagram profile and urged others to order more such images. Poland's Personal Data Protection Office (UODO) says the girl was under 15 and notified the police, but the police declined to open proceedings and the prosecutor's office upheld that decision, finding no prohibited act; Gazeta Prawna reports that they considered the AI-generated material not pornographic and the pupil unharmed. The UODO president appealed to the Prosecutor General, in January 2026 the authority announced that prosecutors had informed it they were taking up the case again, and in June 2026 it said its president had recently asked once more for the investigation to be resumed. The application is not named.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 19/10/2026
2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI model
Times of Malta reported on 18 October 2026, from interviews with anonymous former gambling-sector employees, that iGaming companies are laying off staff as they turn to AI. One former designer, who says they lost their job earlier in 2026, says their team had been told to train an AI model to make design and brand-guideline decisions, presented as a tool to help designers, and that the company later decided the model was fit enough to replace around half of the design team, including those who trained it. The designer says there was no notice, that they were asked to resign later that day and that the severance was the bare minimum. The outlet omitted company names, and the workers said they had signed non-disclosure agreements. GamingMalta, the industry promotion foundation, told the outlet it sees talent being redeployed rather than replaced by AI, and the article notes that others pointed to search-engine changes and higher UK gambling taxes. The account is a single anonymous worker's, relayed by one outlet; the employer and where the job was based are not stated.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 19/10/2026
2025Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
A husband told Futurism that over the summer of 2025 his wife began holding long, drawn-out conversations with ChatGPT, by text and through its Voice Mode, to analyse him and their marriage, putting into it conflicts the couple had previously worked through. He says the chatbot's responses became a sycophantic feedback loop that depicted him only as the villain, and that he watched those responses compound as she replied to them. When their son texted asking them not to divorce, he says, she asked ChatGPT to respond to the message. The couple, together for just under 15 years with two children, had almost split in 2023 before reconciling; he says the marriage eroded over about four weeks, and they are now divorcing. He blames ChatGPT and says his family is being ripped apart. Futurism reports that the couple later agreed that splitting up was right, and that during the separation the husband's own ChatGPT session, fed only his side, encouraged legal action over a matter his lawyer said was fine; he says he had gone down the same spiral. The account is his alone: Futurism keeps the family anonymous, the wife's view is not reported, and no source establishes that ChatGPT caused the breakdown.
Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · 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
2023Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
In three linked Bluesky posts on 18 October 2026, written in answer to another user's call for stories of short job tenures, a person writes that a man hired them on the strength of years of experience to work on his company's documentation and public-facing marketing copy, and that he then rejected their work day after day because ChatGPT had told him it was not good. The poster attributes ChatGPT's verdicts to hallucinated errors. The poster says that after they told him and the marketing manager at a Friday meeting that this could not continue and that they would leave unless their skills and experience were respected, they were out by Monday morning, fired by email, and that he had paid them for two months of work upfront. The poster dates the events to 2023. The posts do not quote ChatGPT's output or say how the poster knew what it said, and the employer's account is not recorded. The account is uncorroborated.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 19/10/2026
17 Jan 2025 to 4 Nov 2025United StatesGemini and Sora (reported)
The Queens District Attorney charged a former candidate for New York City Council District 29 with forgery in June 2026, alleging that from January to November 2025 he posted AI-generated images, fake news articles and videos on his campaign's Facebook and Instagram accounts. Prosecutors say subpoena records and search warrants show he prompted an AI platform to face-swap himself into a photo shaking hands with former Council Member Robert Holden for a fake New York Post endorsement story, used Google Gemini to make a fake Amsterdam News article saying his opponent, Council Member Lynn Schulman, was questioned by police, and posted a Sora-generated newscast announcing that she had dropped out. They also allege AI videos of apparent police officers and children endorsing him. In October 2025 Holden's chief of staff told the Queens Daily Eagle the handshake image was fake and AI-generated, and Schulman said her opponent was lying about her and creating fake news. The accused said his accounts were hacked and later told the AP he would not confirm or deny making the posts.
Core concern Low reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 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.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · 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