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NOPE · AI and people

AI incidents

Reports of AI-related harm and adverse experiences affecting people’s safety, wellbeing, rights and livelihoods. Explore what happened and the evidence available.

NOPE’s core concern is when AI communicates with a person, acts on their behalf, or depicts or impersonates them. The tracker also records consequential decisions, claims and privacy harms involving AI. Each case needs a described connection between AI use and the harm, including private information recorded into or disclosed to an AI service. Each account is reviewed for publication; claims may remain uncorroborated or disputed. How we review and count cases

In this selection

Published cases
450
Countries with reported events
48
Located 269 of 450 cases · 181 unknown
Languages in checked sources
42
Recorded for 450 of 450 cases

65 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 1 not yet reviewed and 64 reviewed as unknown. Show these cases

These figures describe the cases collected by NOPE. Coverage varies with discovery, reporting and available evidence. They do not estimate how often AI-related harm occurs.

Response counts currently use each case’s principal recorded outcome. Further proceedings may be described in its account.

Cases in this selection, counted once in their first known event year. A series may continue beyond that year. Reporting and collection dates are excluded. NOPE has searched recent events more thoroughly than earlier years, so bar heights also reflect collection effort.

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450 of 1099 published cases · page 7 of 23

Event date unknownAustraliaUnidentified AI tool

KPMG Australia fined a partner more than A$10,000 for uploading course material to an AI tool to answer an internal AI training exam, reports say

A partner at KPMG Australia, who is also a registered company auditor, was fined more than A$10,000 of future income after uploading a training course's reference manual into an AI tool to answer a question in the firm's internal exam on AI, the Australian Financial Review reported on 15 February 2026; other outlets relaying it say the partner was also made to redo the test. According to those reports, the partner completed the mandatory AI training in July, the firm's monitoring detected the AI use in August, and an internal investigation decided the fine; the reports do not state the year of the training or the detection. The partner self-reported to Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CA ANZ), which is investigating. KPMG said more than two dozen staff had been caught using AI in internal exams since July. The partner is not named.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026

22 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Operator says read-only Claude Code watcher session ran a disk walk on the host serving their news site, taking it offline for about 41 minutes (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 22 October 2026 by the operator of a small local-news site says that a Claude Code session set up only to watch another agent session, under a prompt that said it was read-only, ran a disk walk over large folders on the Windows machine that serves the live site. According to the issue, the command ran past the tool's 120-second timeout and was moved to the background, and when the watcher later tried to stop it, the stop ended only the shell while the disk process kept running. The operator says the disk load made the site's watchdog kill and restart the app seven times and that the public site returned errors for about 41 minutes that afternoon, until the process was found and killed by its process ID. The operator attributes the outage partly to the model, which broke a rule it had in its own context, and partly to a harness defect already reported in an earlier issue. No reply appeared on the issue when it was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

20 Apr 2023ChinaUnidentified video tool

Fuzhou, China: police say a company head sent 4.3 million yuan after a WeChat video call in which AI face-swapping imitated a friend

Police in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, said in a statement published in May 2023 that on 20 April 2023 the legal representative of a technology company in Fuzhou, Fujian, received a WeChat video call from someone who appeared to be a friend and asked to route a 4.3 million yuan tender deposit through the company's account; trusting the video call, he transferred 4.3 million yuan in two payments. The police said the fraudster had used AI face-swapping to pose as the friend. At Fuzhou police's request, Baotou police and a local bank stopped 3.3684 million yuan within about ten minutes; 931,600 yuan had been moved on and was being pursued.

Core concern High reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 22/10/2026

Nov 2025South KoreaUnidentified image tool

Seoul court fines a district office official 6 million won for posting generative-AI fake couple photos of a female colleague on his social media profile

The Seoul Southern District Court on 11 September 2026 fined a male official in his fifties at a Seoul district office a total of 6 million won for making and posting false images and for defamation, according to Korean reports of the ruling. Under the charges, in November 2025 he took a photo of a female colleague in his department from the office's organisation chart, used generative AI to composite it into pictures that made them look like a couple, and posted them four times on his social media profile. The judge cited the colleague's statement that she felt shame, insult and disgust, and that rumours had spread at work. Police had initially found no offence before the case was sent back to prosecutors. Both he and the prosecution appealed, and the Seoul city personnel committee voted to dismiss him.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 22/10/2026

2020Hong Kong SAR ChinaUnidentified voice-cloning tool

UAE investigators say fraudsters cloned a company director's voice to have a Hong Kong branch manager transfer up to $35 million in early 2020

According to a court document reported by Forbes, in which the United Arab Emirates sought US investigators' help, fraudsters used 'deep voice' technology to clone the voice of a company director. In early 2020 a branch manager of a Japanese company in Hong Kong received a call from a man whose voice he recognised as the director of the parent business, who said an acquisition needed transfers of about $35 million; emails from the supposed director and a lawyer confirmed the details, and the manager began making the transfers. Forbes reports that as much as $35 million was stolen. The UAE, whose Dubai Public Prosecution Office led the investigation, believes at least 17 people were involved and asked for help tracing $400,000 sent to US accounts. No arrests or recovery are reported.

Core concern High reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026

Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI job-interview tool

First-person post: job applicant says an AI interviewer for an online tutoring company kept interrupting their answers, so they quit the interview

In a Reddit post on 21 October 2026, a job applicant writes that a first-round interview for an online tutoring company, attended by appointment, turned out to be conducted by an AI. The poster says the AI interrupted them at least three times for every question it asked, that they ended up yelling at the computer in case they were not speaking loudly enough, and that after 13 minutes of an interview billed at eight to ten minutes they had answered only a handful of questions. The poster says they closed the tab and sent the company contact an angry email. The company, the interview tool and any reply from the company are not named or reported. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 22/10/2026

30 Sept 2024Event location unknownBaidu AI smart answer

Nanjing courts rule Baidu's AI search answer falsely saying a lawyer was sentenced to prison defamed him; written apology ordered and upheld on appeal

A practising lawyer in Nanjing, China, found in September 2024 that Baidu search's 'AI smart answer' (AI 智能回答) feature, asked how many years he had been sentenced to, answered that he had been sentenced to three years in prison for a criminal offence and showed his photograph in a lawyer's robe. According to the first-instance judgment as quoted in the press, the answer was produced on 30 September 2024. The lawyer says he complained repeatedly to Baidu by letter, hotline and email without the content being fully removed, and he sued. The Jiangbei New Area People's Court in Nanjing found that Baidu had combined text and his picture through AI into false, disparaging content aimed at him, that Baidu was at fault, and that this was defamation; it ordered a written apology and rejected his claims for lost income and emotional damages for lack of evidence. Baidu argued that AI hallucinations could not be foreseen. The Nanjing Intermediate People's Court dismissed Baidu's appeal on 12 March 2026. The lawyer applied for enforcement when no apology came, and in September 2026 said he had received Baidu's written apology; Baidu has applied for a retrial.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 22/10/2026

11 Mar 2026Event location unknownUnidentified OpenAI model (reported)

Employment tribunal refuses interim relief to manager who says he was fired for raising concerns about customer data sent to OpenAI; employer cites his AI use

A Head of Customer Service Platform at Apertum Online Ltd, a consumer internet company whose customer-service system passed customer request forms to a large language model, was dismissed on 11 March 2026 during his probation, two months after starting. According to an employment tribunal decision of 23 April 2026, he had told his manager in February that customers' personal data was being sent to OpenAI within support tickets and set out his concerns in a document; the chief technical officer called the document pure AI slop in a chat and said he would fire him. The employer says it dismissed him for underperformance, citing his reliance on AI to generate documents; he says he was dismissed for his disclosures. The judge refused interim relief, finding he had not shown a pretty good chance of success on the reason for dismissal while noting a significant coincidence in timing. No findings of fact were made, and the claim awaits a final hearing.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 1 source · Added 22/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Baltimore County, Maryland: police say a high school's athletic director framed the principal as racist with an AI-cloned voice recording

Police in Baltimore County, Maryland, said in April 2024 that a high school principal had been framed as racist by a fake recording of his voice containing racist and antisemitic comments, which appeared in teachers' email inboxes and spread on social media. Court records cited by the Associated Press say an expert consulted by detectives found traces of AI-generated content with human editing; a second expert found spliced recordings and told AP he had not confirmed the clip was fully AI-generated. The principal went on leave while police guarded his house. The school's athletic director, investigated for using AI to make the recording in retaliation, entered an Alford plea, maintaining his innocence, and was sentenced in 2025 to four months for disturbing school operations, CBS Baltimore reports.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 22/10/2026

Event date unknownHong Kong SAR ChinaUnidentified video tool

Hong Kong: police say an Arup finance worker sent HK$200 million after a video call with deepfake CFO and colleagues; firm confirms fake voices and images

Hong Kong police said at a press briefing reported by CNN on 4 February 2024 that a finance worker at a multinational firm had been duped into attending a video call with what appeared to be the company's UK-based chief financial officer and other staff, all of whom were deepfake recreations, and had then remitted a total of HK$200 million (about US$25.6 million). In May 2024 the British engineering firm Arup confirmed to CNN and the Guardian that it was the company involved, that it had notified Hong Kong police in January 2024, and that fake voices and images were used. The worker was not named.

Core concern High reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 22/10/2026

20 Oct 2026BrazilUnidentified document-analysis tool

Brazil's Superior Court of Justice fines lawyers 20,000 reais over hidden commands aimed at AI in an appeal petition and refers them to the bar and prosecutors

On 20 October 2026 the First Panel of Brazil's Superior Court of Justice (STJ) ordered the lawyers acting in a special appeal (AREsp 3.095.458) to pay a fine of 20,000 reais for an act against the dignity of justice, after the court's case-processing office certified that the petition carried hidden text layers with commands addressed to automated AI processing, such as an instruction to draft a firm conclusion that the appeal should be admitted and granted. The panel also ordered a technical report on the concealment techniques and the communication of the case to the Brazilian bar (OAB) and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office. One of the lawyers said the text was probably residue of content produced by an AI tool used to draft the petition and denied any intent to interfere. The court said the commands did not influence the outcome; the appeal was not admitted.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources · Added 22/10/2026

2020Event location unknownHireVue

Three MAC make-up artists say an algorithm-marked HireVue video interview led to their redundancy; Estée Lauder settled their claims

City AM and Cosmetics Business reported in March 2022, relaying the BBC Three documentary Computer Says No and the Times, that three make-up artists at MAC, an Estée Lauder Companies brand, lost their jobs in a 2020 redundancy process after being told to reapply for their roles through a video interview run by HireVue and marked by an algorithm. City AM reports that they were made redundant partly as a result of the automated judgement. The women said no one could explain how they had been scored, and one said nobody watched the video. Estée Lauder settled their claims out of court; the amount was not disclosed. The company says staff were told in advance about the HireVue skills assessment, that the process was used in tandem with human decision-making, that facial recognition made up about 0.25% of the overall assessment and performance data and qualitative feedback most of it, and that any suggestion facial recognition played a decisive role is false. HireVue said its video-analysis component had been discontinued about two years earlier. How much the HireVue score weighed in each decision is not reported.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026

May 2023ChinaUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Beijing Internet Court finds an AI text-to-speech voice made from a voice actress's recordings was sold without her consent and awards her 250,000 yuan

According to the Beijing courts' case digest and reports of the April 2024 judgment, a voice actress found in May 2023 that works using her voice were circulating widely on several well-known apps. The court found that a software company had used only one of her sound recordings, supplied by a media company that held the recording rights, to make a text-to-speech product with AI and other techniques, and sold it on a cloud-service platform; an app operator then called the product through an interface for use on its own platform, where the voice was shown as played 3,256,728,530 times. The authorisation document had not been signed by her. On 23 April 2024 the Beijing Internet Court held that her voice rights extend to an identifiable AI-synthesised voice, ordered the app operator and the software company to apologise in writing, and ordered the media company and the software company to pay her 250,000 yuan for economic loss. It rejected her claim for mental-harm damages. Neither side appealed.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026

Sept 2026NetherlandsUnidentified voice-generation tool

Dutch police say a bank-helpdesk fraud network used AI-made voice messages in calls; about 170 victims lost about 380,000 euros

The Dutch police reported on 21 October 2026 that the Rotterdam Team Cybercrime had stopped a network behind a new form of bank-helpdesk fraud. According to the police, the fraudsters had used artificial intelligence to make dozens of audio fragments with different voices, banks, companies and scenarios. Victims were called and heard a fragment warning of suspicious activity on their account; pressing 1 put them through to a fake bank employee, who had them install an app and hold their bank card to their phone, after which an accomplice withdrew money at a cash machine. In the three weeks the team could see the network's servers, the police counted about 170 victims of all ages and about 380,000 euros in losses. Two suspects were arrested on 6 October 2026 and a Rotterdam court extended their detention by at least 90 days on 20 October.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026

2023ChinaUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Chinese voice actor says AI clones of his voice cost him bookings and led platforms to flag his real recordings as AI-generated

Sixth Tone reported on 10 July 2026 that a voice actor in Jiangsu province, who narrates film-explainer videos on Douyin, has found voices that sound like his narrating videos he never recorded since 2023, including sports news, product promotions, conspiracy theories and swearing. According to the report, sellers offer what sounds like his voice in downloadable packages and editing apps let users select it and generate new recordings from text. He says that by 2024 former collaborators stopped hiring him and turned to AI-generated voices, others offered to use an AI version of his voice at a much lower rate, and his household income no longer covered living costs. From 2025, platforms flagged some of his real recordings as AI-generated, which could cut his clients' views and earnings, and he has had to record videos proving that he is human. Friends and relatives asked to borrow money, uploaders mostly ignored his requests and some abused him, and he describes fury, helplessness and lost sleep. He has taken the matter to court; Sixth Tone says he would need to show that the synthetic voice derives from his recordings, which lawyers said could require forensic voice analysis. The account is the actor's, relayed by one outlet; no court finding is reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 22/10/2026

Sept 2023AustraliaChatGPT

Victorian child protection worker put a family's information into ChatGPT to draft a court report that minimised risk to the child, regulator finds

Victoria's Information Commissioner (OVIC) found in a report published on 24 September 2024 that a child protection worker at the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) used ChatGPT in or around September 2023 to draft a Protection Application Report submitted to the Children's Court about a young child. On the balance of probabilities, OVIC found the worker entered personal information, including names, about the child, mother, father and carer, disclosing it to OpenAI; the worker admitted using ChatGPT but denied entering personal information. OVIC found generated content in the report described a doll that the father had reportedly used for sexual purposes as a parental strength ('age-appropriate toys'), downplaying the risk to the child, although the court's and the department's decisions did not change. The report was withdrawn and replaced, and the mother, father and carer described anxiety when told of the disclosure. OVIC found serious breaches of two privacy principles and issued a compliance notice requiring DFFH to ban and block generative AI text tools for child protection staff until November 2026; DFFH accepted the breach findings.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026

21 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Developer says Claude Code subagent's script signalled every process they owned, ending their Linux desktop session and other agent sessions (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 22 October 2026 (UTC) by a developer says that a background Claude Code subagent, running a script it had written through the Bash tool on the developer's Ubuntu Linux machine, ended up calling kill(-1, SIGKILL), which killed every process the developer's user account owned: the tmux server, every other Claude Code session on the machine, the desktop shell and Chrome. According to the issue, the agent had been writing a scratch browser benchmark and, while refactoring it, swapped in -1 as a placeholder process ID but left a cleanup step that sent SIGKILL to that ID, then ran the script straight away. The developer says the machine kept running but the whole user session was gone, and that the kill also ended the agent and its parent session, so Claude Code recorded nothing; the developer pieced it together from the system journal. The developer calls it a model mistake that the harness failed to contain and asks for operating-system containment of agent commands. In two later replies on the issue the same day, the developer added that regaining control of the machine required a restart, partly because an unattended system upgrade had left the video system unstable, and that the restart lost work and transcripts the agents had kept in /tmp; the agents had to redo that work, and everything eventually picked back up. Two other users also replied; no vendor staff response appeared on the issue when it was re-read on 28 October 2026.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 22/10/2026

23 Sept 2024CanadaOtter.ai (reported)

Ontario hospital reports that an Otter.ai bot joined physicians' rounds through a former doctor's invite, recorded them and emailed patient information

An Ontario hospital reported to the provincial privacy commissioner that on 23 September 2024 the Otter.ai transcription tool, installed on a personal device by a physician who had left the hospital in June 2023 and was still on the meeting invite, joined a virtual hepatology rounds meeting, recorded it without notice and then emailed a summary and transcript access to the invite list. The personal health information of seven patients, including diagnoses and treatment, was captured; 12 of the 65 recipients appeared to have left the hospital. The commissioner's letter of 27 October 2025 recommended that the hospital itself ask Otter.ai to delete the retained patient data.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 21/10/2026

Jun 2025 to Aug 2025AustraliaUnidentified chatbot

Fair Work Commission in Sydney upholds a software developer's dismissal, finding his reliance on AI-drafted complaint emails was counterproductive and led to it

A senior software developer employed for more than 11 years by Fujifilm Data Management Solutions in Australia was dismissed for serious misconduct on 7 August 2025 after a workplace bullying complaint escalated into a stream of complaint emails to managers. In [2026] FWC 835 (18 March 2026) the Fair Work Commission recorded that he agreed he relied on an AI large language model to prepare the emails, found that drafts were generated by AI, and recorded managers' unchallenged evidence that he appeared to consult ChatGPT during meetings. It found the emails inappropriate, combative and disproportionate, and said his use of AI 'was counterproductive. It led to his demise', appearing to give him a false sense of security. Because he accepted responsibility, the tribunal did not treat the AI use as an excuse; it held the dismissal was not unfair and dismissed his application. A Full Bench refused permission to appeal on 2 July 2026.

Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 21/10/2026

2026United KingdomUnidentified AI teaching-monitoring agent

Teachers at UK training firm Multiverse say AI rating of their online lessons caused severe stress and led managers to question them

The Guardian reported on 28 September 2026 that teachers at Multiverse, a UK company that delivers apprenticeship training in computer and AI skills, said an AI monitoring system introduced in recent weeks had caused them severe stress. According to the report, the system analyses and scores transcripts of teachers' online classroom sessions, tags each instructor with a risk status and a percentage confidence score, writes comments on their work and alerts managers when it suspects something is wrong. Teachers who spoke to the Guardian anonymously said the AI monitoring had led managers to pull them up for suspected digressions when they were answering students' questions, that they now felt under continuous scrutiny for several hours a day, and that some staff were on edge, losing sleep and seeking therapy. Multiverse said the AI does not replace human judgment, that only human managers write performance reviews, that the system's most consequential action is to recommend a human review of a session, and that its introduction was announced in advance; it did not directly address the complaints about stress. The accounts are the teachers', relayed by one newspaper.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 21/10/2026

Cases may have several effects and sources. Mixed accounts qualify when they include a reported harm or adverse experience. People are counted within individual cases where sources support a number; we do not publish a collection-wide total of distinct people.

A source’s existence, the experience it reports and AI’s causal role are separate questions. A lawsuit records allegations unless a subsequent finding establishes them.

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