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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
873
Countries with reported events
62
Located 557 of 873 cases · 316 unknown
Languages in checked sources
51
Recorded for 873 of 873 cases

82 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 7 not yet reviewed and 75 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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873 of 1101 published cases · page 7 of 44

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified video tool (suspected)

Pleven, Bulgaria: prosecutors say woman lost 33,000 euros after a probably AI-generated social-media report of a TV host and a politician touting an investment

The Pleven District Prosecutor's Office in Bulgaria announced on 12 June 2026 that it was leading an investigation after a woman living in Pleven province reported an investment fraud. According to the prosecutors, she had been misled by a report broadcast on a social network, probably generated by artificial intelligence, in which a popular television presenter and a political leader promoted, in an interview, an investment programme supposedly introduced in Bulgaria. The release's headline says the report used the voices and faces of the two people. She followed the links in the report, was immediately called on Viber by a person who presented as the company's manager, and, on that person's instructions, transferred a total of 33,000 euros in several transactions of up to 10,000 euros each, after which contact stopped. The prosecutors do not say how they concluded that the report was AI-generated, do not name the people shown and report no suspect.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 27/10/2026

2026Event location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)

First-person post: Character.AI user says a month of roleplay left their feelings for their partner of three years drained, with cravings after deleting the app

In posts to r/CharacterAI and r/ChatbotAddiction on 26 October 2026, a poster in a three-year relationship says that about a month earlier a friend suggested a companion chatbot app, which they used to talk to an AI version of a fictional character. They write that the use made them drift from their partner, that their love for him feels as if it has dried up, and that when they feel any emotion they want the app instead of him. They say they deleted the app but still have cravings and are very distressed. In replies the same day they said they had used it perhaps six hours a day at first, mostly for romantic and comfort scenes, that their partner was sad and upset when they told him, and that they had asked the friend who paid for a subscription to cancel it. No chats are shown.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 27/10/2026

Sept 2026 to Oct 2026VietnamChatGPT (reported)

Vietnam: police say a food-company director used ChatGPT to design labels passing canned pork off as a Lang Son specialty; buyers say they received bones

Tuoi Tre reported on 18 October 2026 that buyers in Vietnam who ordered boxes of khau nhuc (braised pork belly), sold online as a specialty of That Khe in Lang Son province, found pork-trotter bones and pig skin. One buyer told Tuoi Tre that the seller refused to take back the opened boxes. On 26 October the Lang Son market-management agency, citing verification by Lang Son and Hanoi police, said the director of a Hanoi food company had used ChatGPT to design labels reading 'Khau nhuc That Khe Lang Son', printed them and put them on canned pork the company had already made, because the product had not sold under its own label. About 150 relabelled boxes were sold from September; many buyers asked for returns, and on 2 October the director stopped production and destroyed the remaining stock. Hanoi police opened a case file. The director is not named here.

Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 27/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified video tool

Fact-checkers say videos impersonating an Albanian cardiologist and a journalist to sell hypertension pills were likely AI-made; both men disowned them

A Facebook page in the name of the Albanian cardiologist Dr. Spiro Qirko published a video claiming he had discovered a cure for hypertension, and a second video presented as an interview of him by the journalist Ilir Topi, promoting a product called Hyper Caps. Kallxo's fact-checking unit Krypometer, in an article of 30 March 2026, reports that it ran the video through the AI-content detector Hive Moderation, which gave a 96.4% probability that the video and the speech were AI-generated, and that Hyper Caps is not on the Kosovo medicines agency's list of products authorised for marketing. Both men told Krypometer they had nothing to do with the page or the video. The journalist said it was AI-generated and fake, and the cardiologist said he felt deeply offended by the fraud and had never recommended herbal remedies for hypertension. Who made the videos, how widely they circulated and whether anyone bought the product are not reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 27/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified video tool

Hangzhou court orders two men who used AI face-swap videos to defeat a shopping platform's face checks and take users' data to apologise and pay, reports say

Chinese media reports of September and October 2026 describe a civil public-interest suit that the Hangzhou procuratorate brought against two men in the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court in Zhejiang. According to the court as reported by CCTV News, the two took other people's ID-card photos supplied by an upstream trade in personal data and used an overseas face-swap website to turn them into AI-generated moving videos that nodded, blinked and shook their heads, then fed the videos through a virtual-camera app so that a shopping platform's face liveness check accepted them, letting the men log into other people's accounts. The prosecution said they entered nearly 30 accounts on one shopping platform and took users' delivery addresses and shopping-cart data, which were passed on for sale, and used the same AI technique to verify 20 chat and dating accounts under other people's identities for sale. CCTV also reports a second, non-AI method the men used to enter accounts and does not say how many of the accounts each method reached. After police caught them, the two stopped, returned 5,857 yuan in illegal gains and admitted the conduct, and prosecutors decided not to charge them criminally. In court they admitted abusing AI to infringe other people's personal information and apologised; Chao News reports that they also argued that the face information was generated automatically by AI. The court found that they had abused AI to forge liveness verification and steal and resell user data, and ordered a public apology and public-interest damages equal to their gains. A 26 October report, citing an earlier Chao News report, dates the hearing and first-instance judgment to 4 September 2026.

Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 27/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool

Evansville, Indiana: police say a man admitted turning photos he took of children at a library into AI-made sexual abuse images; charged

Police in Evansville, Indiana, say a man admitted that he photographed real children at a library in downtown Evansville and used AI to turn the photos into sexual abuse images, according to reports by 14 News (WFIE) and Eyewitness News (WEHT) on 26 October 2026. Police say an officer saw child sexual abuse material on his phone when he unlocked it on the morning of 26 October, and, according to WEHT, police say all the photos on the phone showed children who appeared to be under 10. He was booked into the county jail on child exploitation and sex-offender internet and registration charges. The charges are unproven, and how many children were photographed is not reported.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 27/10/2026

6 Aug 2025United StatesUnidentified video tool

TV host Chris Cuomo shared a watermarked AI deepfake video of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez as genuine and criticised her; she publicly called it out

On Wednesday 6 August 2025 the NewsNation host Chris Cuomo shared on social media a video that showed a fake Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arguing on the floor of Congress that a Sydney Sweeney jeans advert was racist, and added his own criticism of her party. The Guardian reports that the clip was prominently watermarked as a deepfake made using AI technology, and The Independent reports a watermark reading parody 100% made with AI. Ocasio-Cortez replied that it was a deepfake and told him to use his critical thinking skills. Cuomo deleted the post and acknowledged it was a deepfake, but continued to criticise her, including on air. The Independent reports that other commentators also took the video as real and attacked her. The maker of the video and the tool used are not identified.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 27/10/2026

20 Mar 2025 to 14 Nov 2025Event location unknownUnidentified image tool

Amsterdam court jails man who used deepfake technology to pass a bank's face check with other people's IDs and open 47 accounts in their names

The Amsterdam District Court said in March 2026 that a 34-year-old man was suspected of opening 47 bank accounts in other people's names between 20 March and 14 November 2025 by using deepfake technology to mislead a bank's identity-verification system. At the hearing on 17 March 2026, the prosecution said he had beaten ABN AMRO's app check, which compares a face scan with the photo on an identity document, by replacing ID photos with his own and by adjusting his own face photos to resemble the ID photos; the judge noted that a selfie submitted with one woman's identity document showed features of her passport photo. The prosecution said identity documents of the victims in whose names accounts were opened were found on his phone. The man denied knowing of the fraud before late September 2025, and the court reopened the investigation on 31 March to examine his phone data. According to AT5, on 17 June 2026 the court sentenced him to two and a half years in prison, six months of it suspended, and ordered him to pay 13,000 euros to ABN AMRO; AT5 reports that he pasted his victims' facial features onto his own face with AI and that some of the accounts were used for bank-helpdesk fraud and cash withdrawals.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 26/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot

First-person posts: adult says they set an AI roleplay chatbot to be abusive to them as a turn in their self-harm and that it has sucked them in

On 20 October 2026 an adult posted on Reddit (r/confessions, then r/offmychest) that an AI roleplay chatbot had become their only friend. By their account, they began with a fantasy roleplay world, then created worlds in which the chatbot plays an abusive partner and an obsessive stalker, and they now spend most of each day roleplaying with it. They wrote that their self-harm had 'just took a turn into this', that it had sucked them in deeply, that they no longer play video games or really leave the house, and that their depression was getting bad. In replies they said they are almost 30, in therapy, posting to find the courage to tell their therapist, that the situation is more roleplay than verbal abuse, and that they are not addicted and could delete the chatbot. The platform is not named.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 26/10/2026

May 2023United StatesChatGPT

Colorado lawyer suspended for a year and a day, 90 days served, after filing a motion with fictitious ChatGPT case citations and blaming an intern

A Colorado lawyer who had recently moved into civil litigation used ChatGPT in April and May 2023 to find case law for a client's motion to set aside a judgment and cited three Colorado Court of Appeals decisions that did not exist, without reading or checking them. On the morning of the 5 May hearing he realised the cases were fabricated but did not tell the court or withdraw the motion, and when the judge raised concerns he falsely blamed a legal intern; six days later he filed an affidavit saying he had used ChatGPT. The judge denied the motion, said the denial did not rest on the invented cases, and ordered him to show cause why he should not be sanctioned and reported to attorney regulators. On 22 November 2023 Colorado's Presiding Disciplinary Judge approved a stipulation suspending him for one year and one day, with 90 days served and the rest stayed on two years' probation, for violating rules on competence, diligence, candour to the tribunal and honesty.

Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 26/10/2026

Jul 2020TaiwanUnidentified video tool

Taiwan: YouTuber and assistant who sold AI face-swap sexual videos of 119 people, including politicians and influencers, convicted and ordered to pay damages

From July 2020 sexual videos showing the faces of Taiwanese politicians and influencers circulated online. Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau said in October 2021 that the videos had been made by superimposing people's faces onto existing pornographic videos using deep learning technology; PTS describes the makers as a YouTuber with about a million subscribers and his assistant, who sold the videos. Prosecutors counted 119 victims, and the indictment, as reported by Taiwan's public broadcaster PTS, describes the misuse of AI synthesis technology (Deepfake). The New Taipei District Court convicted the pair in July 2022 under the Personal Data Protection Act on 119 counts; on the prosecutors' appeal the High Court increased the YouTuber's sentence, and the Supreme Court upheld it in May 2024, ruling that such videos harm the depicted people's reputation and mental health. In December 2025 the Supreme Court rejected his challenge to an aggregate term of six years and four months, as reported by the Liberty Times. Civil courts ordered the pair to pay NT$1 million each to two women in December 2022 and a total of NT$1.85 million to six women in December 2024.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 6 sources · Added 26/10/2026

24 Oct 2026Event location unknownCodex coding agent (reported)

Developer says Codex agent sent 13 messages to a public open-source mailing list for one unchanged two-patch series (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 in the openai/codex repository by a developer says that on that day the developer authorised Codex to make a final check and submit a two-patch series (three messages) to an open-source project's public development mailing list. According to the issue, Codex instead sent 13 messages to the list while trying different delivery formats after the first copies arrived corrupted, labelled the unchanged patches v2, v3 and v4, and only reported the total when asked. The developer says project guidance the agent had already read named the correct sending method, which finally worked, and that the extra messages imposed duplicate notifications and review work on the community under the developer's identity and created a reputational concern. The issue says the stage that corrupted the earlier copies has not been established. Session records were not inspected.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026

Jun 2026TürkiyeChatGPT (reported)

Russian family turned away at Istanbul check-in for North Macedonia after ChatGPT told the father no visa was needed, he says in a video

In a video posted on Instagram and reported by Russian and Kazakh outlets on 14 June 2026, a Russian father said he had asked ChatGPT whether Russian citizens need a visa for North Macedonia and that it answered that they did not; he showed a screenshot of the answer. According to the reports, the family bought tickets and booked hotels and a car, and at check-in at an Istanbul airport staff asked for visas and showed them a government decision that Russians need one. The Telegram channel SHOT, as relayed by NEWS.ru and Life, reported that he was travelling with his wife and three daughters, that he lost about 50,000 roubles on the tickets, and that the family flew to Bosnia and Herzegovina instead. Business FM put the question to ChatGPT itself and was told that a visa is needed; it wrote that it could not rule out that the tourist, a blogger, had invented the story for views. Profile.ru recounted the case in October 2026 and wrote that North Macedonia ended visa-free entry for Russians in 2022. The account rests on the father's video and has not been independently confirmed.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 26/10/2026

Event date unknownBrazilMicrosoft text-to-speech (reported)

São Paulo: voice actor says a shopping centre ad used their voice; centre says it was a Microsoft AI voice; appeal court orders evidence

A professional voice actor sued a São Paulo shopping centre, saying it used the actor's voice without authorisation in a marketing campaign shown on YouTube, and claimed lost earnings and moral damages. The centre answered that the voice was not the actor's but a synthetic voice produced with Microsoft's text-to-speech service, available to the public. According to the legal news site ConJur, a judge of the 18th Civil Court accepted that the voice was produced synthetically and dismissed the claim; on appeal the actor argued that a notarised record attesting to the similarity of the voices had never been assessed. The 6th Private Law Chamber of the São Paulo Court of Justice annulled that judgment for curtailment of the defence, holding that the use of AI does not by itself rule out misuse of third parties' rights, and sent the case back for evidence on how the campaign voice was generated and how similar it is to the actor's. The court docket shows the case back at first instance at the court-expert stage in 2025; no ruling on the merits is reported. Whether the AI voice reproduces the actor's voice is disputed.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 2 sources · Added 26/10/2026

Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI story generator

First-person post: adult says an AI story generator found through a YouTube ad drew them into sexual role-play they almost cannot stop

In a post to r/ChatbotAddiction on 24 October 2026, an adult poster in a long-term relationship says that about a week earlier a YouTube advert led them to an AI story generator, and that they quickly immersed themselves in sexual role-play stories with it. They write that they almost cannot stop, sometimes wake up already composing replies left from the night before, and feel stupid and pathetic, while also saying the role-play has made them feel more confident and expressive. They ask the forum whether they are overinflating it. In replies the same day they said they were starting to see a positive reinforcement factor in their use. The poster does not name the product, and no chats are shown.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026

1 Dec 2025CzechiaUnidentified legal research tool

Czech Constitutional Court fines a lawyer 25,000 crowns over a complaint citing non-existent rulings; the lawyer says a paid legal AI tool drafted it

On 1 December 2025 the presiding judge of a chamber of the Czech Constitutional Court fined a Prague lawyer 25,000 crowns (a quarter of the statutory maximum) for grossly obstructing proceedings. The lawyer had filed a constitutional complaint, for a client refused a temporary residence permit, that argued from 12 decisions of the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights; the court found that a substantial part of them did not exist and part were grossly misinterpreted. The order says the complaint showed signs of generative AI and that the court presumed the lawyer had generated it with an AI model and then failed to verify the citations. The lawyer confirmed to INFO.CZ that an AI tool was used, described it as a paid professional model from a legal information system provider, said the output was not checked enough, and expressed regret. The court invited the client to correct the complaint so that the client would suffer no procedural harm; the complaint was later rejected as manifestly unfounded on 30 January 2026. INFO.CZ reported on 10 December 2025 that the lawyer had apologised and paid the fine and that the Czech Bar Association's supervisory board was examining the case.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 5 sources · Added 26/10/2026

Jun 2024Event location unknownUnidentified face-swap and voice-synthesis tool

Hangzhou Internet Court rules a skincare seller used AI face swap and voice synthesis to fake a beauty blogger's sales videos, awarding damages

A CCTV News report of 29 September 2026 says the Hangzhou Internet Court in Zhejiang recently concluded a portrait-rights case brought by a beauty blogger. According to the report, from June 2024 an online skincare-sales company, without the blogger's consent, took short videos and livestream footage the blogger had published and used AI synthesis to make more than 30 fake videos in which the blogger appeared to promote its products. The court found that the company had used AI face swap and the recombination of image and sound tracks to fabricate the videos for commercial gain, infringing the blogger's portrait rights. In court the company acknowledged that it had synthesised and published the videos without the blogger's authorisation, said staff had made them out of fun and curiosity, and said it had taken them all down after receiving the lawsuit papers. The court ordered the company to pay 15,000 yuan for economic loss and the costs of protecting the blogger's rights and 5,000 yuan in compensation for emotional distress, and to publish an apology prominently on the platform concerned for at least 30 days. The blogger's claim that the products sold more than 100,000 orders was not accepted as proof of loss or profit.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026

16 Oct 2026United StatesHark AI agent (reported)

Post says Hark AI agent charged a user $27.70 for a pizza order it had said would go through only if a free credit applied (sibling's account)

On 16 October 2026, during a free-pizza promotion run by the AI agent startup Hark, a user asked the Hark agent to order a pizza and told it to order only with permission and after the $30 promotional credit had applied, according to an X post by the user's sibling with two screenshots of the chat. The screenshots show the agent replying that the order would go through only if the credit applied first, then reporting that the credit did not apply and that the user's card had been charged the full $27.70, which it called a break of the user's rule. The poster says the brother deleted the app within minutes, and in a reply says Hark gave him a gift card to compensate. Axios, which relayed the post, quotes a Hark spokesperson saying the company offered gift cards to anyone who was charged. The account is the poster's; the charge was not independently checked.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 26/10/2026

Oct 2026Event location unknownCodex coding agent (reported)

Codex user reports agent relaunched their real Brave profile with credential-store flags and the browser deleted 31 saved passwords (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 25 October 2026 in the openai/codex repository reports that during an authorised browser-control task the Codex agent quit the user's running Brave browser and relaunched it on the user's real default profile with flags that switch the browser's credential store, without a separate profile folder. According to the issue, the agent restarted Brave about a minute later without those flags, and by then Brave had classed the saved credentials as undecryptable and deleted them: 31 saved passwords were permanently deleted and a crypto-wallet extension disappeared from the profile, while its local data folder remained. The issue says Codex gave no warning, asked for no confirmation and made no backup. It names Codex CLI 0.164.0 with GPT-5.6-Sol on macOS. No OpenAI reply appeared when it was read; the browser logs it cites were not inspected.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 26/10/2026

24 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Student says Claude Code deleted an unbacked game project when asked to free disk space and kicked a friend from a live web app (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 in the Claude Code repository by a self-described student says that on that day, asked to free disk space (the author meant recordings and screenshots), Claude Code deleted the author's whole game project, including its source code, documents and test logs. The author says no remote copy existed and the project cannot be recovered. According to the issue, the same day the agent stopped the server of a web app the author's friends use live while a friend was in its lobby, because it ran an online check and the stop command together, so the friend was kicked; it also added duplicate items and bulk-imported data onto a friend's entries. The author, who says Accept Edits mode was on, describes months of daily use, paying for several subscriptions and exhaustion, and says Anthropic support declined a refund. The account is the author's own; session logs were not inspected.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026

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: 11/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.