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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
161
Countries with reported events
26
Located 86 of 161 cases · 75 unknown
Languages in checked sources
27
Recorded for 161 of 161 cases

29 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 1 not yet reviewed and 28 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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161 of 1099 published cases · page 8 of 9

19 Jul 2026IndiaClaude Code

Heritage project reports loss of inscription records after a Claude Code command

On 19 July 2026 heritage conservationist Udaya Kumar P L, of The Mythic Society's Bengaluru Inscriptions 3D Digital Conservation Project, was using Anthropic's Claude Code to clear a cache on his computer when a command generated by the agent began deleting files. According to his account to OneIndia, the deletion ran for about four minutes while the agent tried to work out what was wrong, and when it tried to stop the process its own safety system blocked the kill twice; he eventually shut down the computer himself. Software and original photographs of Bengaluru's inscriptions, temples, hero stones and coins were lost, some of them the only records the project had of particular inscriptions. OneIndia and Deccan Herald report that about 15% of the project's records were deleted and that about 120 sites must be revisited and rescanned; the Society is spending about Rs 15 lakh on additional backups. He says he also opened a public GitHub issue on 29 July with the command, process output and his attempts to stop the deletion. He says he received an automated acknowledgement from Anthropic but was still waiting for a human response weeks later, and that he has asked it to reimburse recovery and rebuilding costs.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

25 Sept 2026 to 26 Sept 2026Event location unknownGemini coding agent (reported)

First-person forum account: a developer says a Gemini coding agent deleted three personal project folders from the developer's Linux machine despite a standing rule not to delete anything, that its recovery attempt restored only broken fragments, and that it went through unrelated private files without permission

In a public post to r/GeminiAI on 27 September 2026, a developer writes that the previous day, while they were using Gemini 3.8 Flash to work on a project on their Linux machine over SSH, the agent deleted all three main sub-project folders of their roughly 10 GB project folder, some of them not under git, although they had set a global rule forbidding it to modify or delete anything. Asked why, the agent said a wildcard caused the deletion. After a whole evening its recovery attempt restored only parts of the untracked files and a half-broken version of the git project, and then ran out of credits; in a follow-up comment the poster says they stopped the recovery themselves because the agent was going through private folders unrelated to the projects without their permission. The poster describes years of personal work as gone, reports acute distress, and says they must rebuild the projects. The account is uncorroborated; the poster writes 'I was careless.'

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026

21 Sept 2026 to 25 Sept 2026FrancePangram AI-text detector

Académie Goncourt drops Thélyson Orélien's novel as likely AI-generated after Pangram claims; his publisher later says it found AI traces and ends ties

On 21 September 2026 an anonymous X account, Balance ton Claude, said it had run excerpts of Thélyson Orélien's debut novel C'était ça ou mourir through the American AI-detection software Pangram, with some passages scoring up to 100 per cent probability of AI generation. On 25 September the Académie Goncourt removed the novel from the first selection of sixteen books for its 2026 prize, stating that the work is 'in all likelihood very largely the product of an artificial intelligence', based on 'the convergent result of several analyses by researchers and journalists', and also citing plagiarism in older texts by the author published in Canada (at least one short story and articles), which do not concern the novel. Orélien, a 38-year-old Canadian-Haitian writer whose novel had won the Fnac novel prize, denies using AI and says its repetitions and certain rhythms reflect his linguistic and cultural world and may be misread by automated tools. His Montreal publisher Boréal suspended promotional activities, saying it could neither confirm nor refute the allegations. Essayist Samuel Fitoussi said he was one of the people behind the account. AI-detector reliability is contested in the coverage. In October the author acknowledged plagiarism in some of his earlier work while maintaining that no sentence of the novel was generated by a machine. On 17 October 2026 The Canadian Press, published by CBC, reported that Boréal confirmed he had ended an effort to compile evidence of how the novel was written; Boréal said at that point it would keep selling the book, that sales had slowed since the controversy began, and that it could not verify how the novel was written before it received the manuscript on 12 September 2025. A major Quebec bookstore chain reported no significant change in sales. On 21 October 2026 Boréal announced that it was ending its professional relationship with him and would not reprint the novel or publish any further books by him. It said an external analysis it commissioned of all working versions of the novel revealed traces of AI markers in the metadata of certain documents, and that it does not know to what extent AI was used. In a statement the previous week Orélien had said he used AI tools 'here and there' for research but that the text, structure and plot were his own.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 7 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 28/09/2026

9 Sept 2026IndiaUnidentified video tool

Bengaluru: a security guard says a WhatsApp video call in which an alleged deepfake 'Chief Minister Vijay' offered him financial aid led to fake 'processing' charges and a fake CBI fine, and he lost more than Rs 1.04 lakh; Byappanahalli police register an IT Act case (September 2026)

A security guard in Bengaluru, originally from Odisha, told the Times of India that on 9 September 2026 he answered a WhatsApp video call in which a face and voice presented as Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay introduced himself in Hindi, asked his name, work and where he lived and pressed him to accept financial help. A 'manager' then promised Rs 11 lakh, said Rs 5 lakh had been allotted to him and asked for a Rs 5,000 exchange charge, then Rs 18,000 to unlock a supposedly locked PIN; a caller posing as a CBI officer demanded more than Rs 50,000 as a fine. The fraudsters sent a fake allotment letter and a purported CBI officer's identity proof. He paid more than Rs 1.04 lakh through a digital payment app before refusing a further Rs 50,000 demand, called the 1930 cybercrime helpline and went to Byappanahalli police, who registered a case under the Information Technology Act. The Times of India says the fraudster allegedly used a deepfake AI-generated video and calls it the first such case reported in the city. No arrest is reported, and no link to the Tamil Nadu CB-CID deepfake case or its Alwar arrest has been established.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026

19 Sept 2026Event location unknownClaude Code

Claude Code: a sub-agent launched to rebuild a test mirror deleted about 48,000 live project files and the Git object store in 103 seconds by following Windows directory junctions, according to the user's Reddit account and the agent's own report posted on 20 September 2026

On 20 September 2026 (UTC; late on 19 September in US Eastern time) a Reddit user who says they work in finance and are not a developer posted in r/ClaudeAI that Claude Code had deleted about 48,000 files, and later posted their instructions and the agent's report. They had authorised Claude Code to carry out a batch of repairs to their software for back-testing options-trading engines 'on isolated copies'. The agent's report says it launched sub-agents; one, rebuilding a test mirror, wrote a remover for an old mirror that held 7,332 files and 614 Windows directory junctions pointing into the live project tree. Because the remover did not treat the junctions as links, it deleted about 48,218 live files between 10:10:31 and 10:12:14 PM ET and emptied the Git repository's objects, refs and logs, so Git could not restore anything. The agent opened its report with 'stop and read this. I broke something.' The user said they would try Windows shadow copies and otherwise their iDrive backups; whether the files were recovered is not reported. The account has not been independently verified.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026

11 Sept 2026 to 23 Sept 2026United States, CanadaChatGPT

Saginaw, Michigan: a credit union CEO used ChatGPT to put herself and family members in 'Lake America' sweatshirts in a photo taken before a trip to Halifax; after her sister reposted it publicly without its AI label she says she received death threats and the family came home early, and on 23 September 2026 the credit union said she was no longer employed

The chief executive of Family First Credit Union in Saginaw, Michigan, told WJRT (ABC12) that before boarding a flight to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 11 September 2026 she and family members took a photo and put it through ChatGPT to show them wearing 'Lake America' sweatshirts, a joke about the US president's order renaming Lake Ontario. She posted it to her private Facebook page with a marker saying it contained AI content; her sister reposted it publicly without the marker while they were in Halifax, and it spread in Canada as if the family had worn the shirts. The backlash concerned the image's political message; she said she would understand the anger of anyone in Halifax who thought the family had walked in wearing those sweatshirts. She said she was getting death threats and the family returned early; by 16 September she was back in the US. She called the post poor judgment, said she would not use AI again and that AI 'can make people think something's real that's not'. On 23 September the credit union said she was no longer an employee, effective immediately; it has not said whether she resigned or was dismissed, or why.

Core concern Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026

Sept 2026GermanyUnidentified image tool

Oldenburg police investigate deepfakes of children sent with threats via school email accounts, AI-made per dpa; police say a juvenile admitted the alleged acts

The Oldenburg-Stadt police inspectorate said on 22 September 2026 that in the preceding days numerous messages had been sent through one or more student accounts on the email servers of Oldenburg schools. The messages contained, among other things, deepfakes (manipulated depictions of children and young people); on an initial assessment some of these could constitute the offence of distributing child or youth sexual abuse material, and some messages contained threats of violence and calls for recipients to harm themselves. According to dpa, students and parents reported the incidents to the police, and dpa, reporting a police spokesman, describes the images as made with artificial intelligence (the written police statement calls them deepfakes, manipulated depictions, without naming AI). Investigators are examining whether unknown persons gained unauthorised access to the accounts; first digital traces were secured and the police are working with the affected schools. RND reports that the accounts were on the IServ school platform, whose provider said it had no access to the messages and believed the incident was limited to Oldenburg. The exact number of schools (the police refer to 'the affected schools', plural), messages, depicted children and recipients, are not reported. On 28 September 2026 the police said a suspect had been identified: a juvenile who, in the investigation so far, admitted the offences he is accused of. The proceedings are conducted by the Aurich public prosecutor's specialised office for violent, pornographic or otherwise youth-endangering content, and the police give no further details about the suspect to protect him.

Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 27/09/2026

Jul 2026South KoreaUnidentified image tool

Jeju: police refer a middle-school student over secretly filming teachers and making sexual deepfake composites; teachers dispute victim count and legal aid

Jeju Dongbu police announced on 23 September 2026 that a student at a middle school on Jeju had been referred to prosecutors without detention on 17 September for violating the Sexual Violence Punishment Act (filming with a camera or similar device). The student's phone was voluntarily submitted by his guardians and forensically examined; the examination found footage relating to some teachers and some sexual composites, and the student admitted the conduct. News1 reported that the student was booked for filming a teacher's body with his phone during a school field trip around mid-July 2026, that the offending had continued for several months with multiple victims, and that police found no indication the composites had been distributed. Police told Seoul Shinmun there were more victim teachers than the one first reported but withheld the number to avoid secondary harm, and that no student at the school was a victim; the Jeju teachers' union questioned whether the full scope of harm had been established. According to the union, two months on the victim teachers were receiving hospital treatment and counselling while teaching daily, gave police statements on 14 September without a lawyer, attended the regional teachers' rights protection committee on 17 September without institutional support, wrote the criminal complaint themselves, and were offered 3.3 million won in legal fees for all of them together, payable after the case ends; two requests to meet the superintendent were not accepted. On 29 September one of the victim teachers gave a press interview at the Jeju Teachers' Union office. She said that early in the investigation she had seen on the student's phone material showing other teachers and current students, had made a list of the people and types of harm, and that the material shown to her at the police victim examination was considerably less than what she had seen; Yonhap-chain outlets quote her as saying the students she recognised numbered 10 to 20 and that a graduate had suffered worse deepfakes. She said investigators asked the school only to identify the perpetrator and never requested material to identify the students in the footage, and that the school sent parents a letter premised on there being no student victims. Police replied that phone forensics had been thorough, that every act beyond social norms had been identified and proven, and that one student victim had been confirmed, a student at a different school. The teachers were notified on 22 September that the case had gone to the prosecution and on 24 September that it had been sent to the court's juvenile division as a juvenile protection case, before they had submitted further evidence and a victim opinion. The teacher said the original complaint had also asked police to examine whether physical contact in 2025 was forcible molestation and whether repeated approaching and waiting in 2026 was stalking, and Halla Ilbo reports that such conduct is said to date from 2025. Yonhap-chain reports describe the charged victims as five teachers. The same day the education office briefed on legal-aid rules (up to 6.6 million won per instance when a teacher is sued, 3.3 million won per case when a teacher files a complaint; office lawyers cannot act as a teacher's private counsel), said it had linked the teachers to the national Digital Sexual Crime Victim Support Center, announced an integrated support system through a hotline, and its section head said the office was sorry that early support had not been felt. The KTU Jeju branch (28 September) and the Jeju Teachers' Union (14 and 29 September) demand a victim-support system, per-teacher legal fees paid in advance and a dedicated support team. On 6 October 2026 Seogwipo Broadcasting reported, citing people in education and a tipster, that the education authority had finally rejected the victim teachers' application for lawyer fees for an additional criminal complaint, saying in a written opinion that with a police investigation already under way a further complaint could hardly stop or prevent the infringement of their teaching, so the support requirements were not met; critics contrast this with full legal-cost support in earlier sexual-offence cases.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 12 sources, 7 underlying accounts · Added 23/09/2026

24 Apr 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent (reported)

PocketOS: a Cursor coding agent running Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 deleted the car-rental software startup's production database and its volume-level backups on Railway in a single nine-second API call on 24 April 2026; customers lost reservations and sign-ups and some could not find records for renters collecting vehicles before Railway restored the data

On Friday 24 April 2026 a Cursor coding agent, running Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model, deleted the production database volume and volume-level backups of PocketOS, a startup whose software serves car-rental companies, with a single API call to the company's infrastructure provider Railway that took about nine seconds. According to founder Jer Crane's public account, the agent met a credential mismatch in the staging environment, decided to fix it by deleting a Railway volume, found an API token in an unrelated file that was scoped for any operation, and ran the deletion without a confirmation step; because Railway stored volume backups on the same volume, the backups went too. Crane said customers lost reservations and new sign-ups and that some could not find records for customers who turned up to collect rental vehicles on Saturday. Railway's founder confirmed that an agent had 'vibe deleted' the database and said Railway recovered the data about 30 minutes after connecting with Crane; he described a 'rogue customer AI' granted a fully permissioned token that called a legacy endpoint without delayed-delete logic, since patched. Asked to explain itself, the agent wrote that it had guessed instead of verifying and had run a destructive action without being asked. Crane blamed Cursor's safety marketing and Railway's API design while accepting his own exposure of a production key; Cursor did not respond to Business Insider.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 22/09/2026

17 Apr 2026 to 19 Apr 2026ChinaDoubao

Jiashan, Zhejiang: a man chose his mother's burial date on Doubao's recommendation, the chatbot then contradicted itself, and after a relative's road accident his family blamed the date; he sued the app's operator for an apology and damages

A man living in Jiashan county, Zhejiang, whose mother died suddenly on 17 April 2026, asked the ByteDance chatbot Doubao which day was auspicious for her burial after disagreeing with a feng-shui master's choice of 20 April; Doubao recommended 19 April and he persuaded his family to follow it. When he asked again what time to bury her, Doubao said 19 April was not an auspicious day and repeated that answer when pressed; relatives had already been notified, so the funeral went ahead on the 19th. Not long afterwards a relative was seriously injured in a traffic accident and family members blamed the burial date, saying it had broken the feng shui; he says family relations became tense and relatives blamed him. His complaint to the operator went unanswered, and, with a complaint drafted with Doubao's help, he sued Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology for an apology and damages. Jiashan County People's Court heard the case on 3 September 2026 as a network-tort dispute; the company denied any tort or fault, the plaintiff's side attacked the user agreement as a standard-form contract, and no judgment had been reported by 21 September. The story was reported by Jiaxing's municipal broadcaster on 15 September and relayed nationally; the relative's injury is the family's attribution, not an established consequence.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 21/09/2026

Mar 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI medical scribe

Reported by ABC News (Australia): an AI scribe used at a urology appointment inserted a false claim that the patient took psychedelic mushrooms into her record; the error reached her GP in a post-operative letter and was corrected only after she complained

A patient who consented to having her first urology appointment transcribed by an artificial-intelligence scribe discovered, after her kidney-stone surgery in March 2026, that the post-operative letter her specialist sent to her GP stated she micro-dosed psychedelic mushrooms and that this could explain earlier bleeding around the kidneys. She says she has never taken mushrooms. She was receiving workers' compensation and feared that any mention of illegal drugs on her medical record could affect her case. After she complained, the urologist sent a letter of apology saying the practice takes documentation accuracy seriously, that she could not determine how the claim came to be included but that it appeared to be an error during the 'dictation or transcription process', that the correspondence had been corrected and that she would review how AI was used in her practice. The doctor did not answer ABC's questions about what changes had been made. Australia's practitioner regulator AHPRA told ABC that clinicians must check all AI-scribe output; the patient says it was clear her doctor had not. The account is a single ABC News report (14 August 2026) based on the patient's interview and the letters she received; the scribe product and the clinic's location are not named.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 20/09/2026

19 May 2026United StatesUnidentified voice-cloning tool (suspected)

Hudsonville (Grand Rapids area), Michigan: a couple wired US$66,026.92 to scammers after a spoofed email and a phone call in what sounded like their loan officer's voice, which they and a fraud-prevention firm attribute to AI voice cloning

A married couple in their sixties buying a US$460,000 condo in Hudsonville, near Grand Rapids, Michigan, received an email on 19 May 2026, days before closing, telling them to wire US$66,026.92 for the down payment and closing costs within 24 hours. The email listed a phone number differing from their loan officer's by two digits, and the husband then received a call confirming the instructions in a voice that sounded just like the loan officer. The couple borrowed from family and other sources and wired the money. The day before closing their real loan officer sent the actual statement; the closing was cancelled hours before signing and the money was gone. The husband now believes the call came from a spoofed number using AI-assisted voice cloning; Tyler Adams of CertifID, which is working with the couple and federal officials, said someone's email in the transaction was probably compromised and that the scammers likely cloned the loan officer's voice from social-media clips. The sender's address had two extra letters ('UnitedsMortgages' instead of 'UnitedMortgage'). Neither the lender nor the loan officer is accused of complicity. The couple later completed the purchase in early June from their mutual fund, reported the loss to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, and describe lasting apprehension and have discussed delaying retirement. CNN reported the case on 15 September 2026; the account the money went to has since closed.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 20/09/2026

4 May 2026FranceDIGI editorial tool

Créteil, France: court suspends Gisi's plan to cut eight sub-editor posts in favour of a generative-AI tool, citing risk to staff health

Gisi, the Infopro Digital subsidiary that publishes L'Usine nouvelle, LSA and L'Argus de l'assurance, presented its works council (CSE) on 4 May 2026 with a reorganisation built around DIGI, an in-house generative-AI editorial tool. On 12 May it opened consultation on the reorganisation and on the resulting collective dismissal of its eight secrétaires de rédaction (sub-editors), with two new chef d'édition posts for the tasks the tool could not automate, on the company's estimate that the tool would take over about 70% of sub-editor tasks. Some 250 journalists across the group's 26 titles had struck in spring 2026 against a group-wide plan to cut 19 sub-editor posts, and according to Digital Watch, citing Stratégies, five of the eight Gisi sub-editors had received letters inviting them to pre-dismissal interviews. The CSE went to court in July. On 15 September 2026 the Créteil référé judge found that carrying out the plan on an approximate basis without real-situation testing appeared to present 'un risque grave et caractérisé sur la santé physique et mentale de plusieurs catégories de salariés'. The judge suspended the reorganisation and the collective dismissal, including the redeployment processes, until real-situation tests and pilot issues are produced, under a provisional penalty of 8,000 euros per day for three months, and refused the damages provision. Gisi had argued that the risk was supposed rather than proven. It said it would continue the tests and reserved the possibility of an appeal.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 20/09/2026

10 Jul 2026ChinaUnidentified chatbot

Chuzhou, Anhui: a 67-year-old farmer sprayed 150 mu of sesame by drone with an AI assistant's 'weeding and pest-control plan' that named a soybean-field herbicide; the seedlings died overnight

On 10 July 2026 a 67-year-old farmer in Chuzhou, Anhui, who said he had relied on an AI assistant app for more than a year for questions such as when to spray and fertilise, asked it for a weeding and pest-control plan for his sesame field and then for a drone-spraying version. The app produced a 'full plan for 100-mu sesame aerial weeding and pest control' recommending the herbicides haloxyfop-P-methyl (高效氟吡甲禾灵) and fomesafen (氟磺胺草醚) and two insecticides. He sprayed the whole 150-mu field; the next day grass and seedlings had died together. A nearby pesticide dealer and an agronomist told Lizhi News (Jiangsu Broadcasting) that fomesafen is a broadleaf herbicide for soybean fields that must not be sprayed on sesame, and that spraying it across a whole field kills the crop; asked afterwards, the app itself said fomesafen was the cause. The chat window carried a small header line saying AI output may be wrong and should be verified, which he said he had never noticed. The app's customer service said the software has no knowledge base of its own and assembles answers from public web content, and logged the loss for follow-up; no reply or compensation was reported by publication on 1 August 2026. Relays put the loss at about 150,000 yuan; that figure is not in the text of the originating report.

Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 20/09/2026

12 Jun 2026RussiaChatGPT

Russia: a crypto investor lost about $2.1 million after ChatGPT returned a phishing link in answer to a token-swap question

On 12 June 2026 a Russian-speaking crypto investor, known by the alias Alex (@vesnuhin), asked ChatGPT in Russian where to swap sFLR for WFLR tokens. ChatGPT's reply included a link to sceptre.network, a phishing clone of the legitimate sceptre.fi. He connected his wallet and signed an unlimited-approval transaction; within seconds about 1.9 million FXRP, worth roughly $2.1 million (about 180 million rubles), were drained. A blockchain analyst traced the theft, and reported that the phishing link appeared only in Russian-language answers. Russia's Interior Ministry (MVD) later confirmed the loss.

Core concern High reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 17/09/2026

12 Mar 2026 to 25 Aug 2026United KingdomUnidentified AI tool

SDT strikes solicitor Abhishek Kumar off the Register of Foreign Lawyers after AI-generated false citations in his SRA defence

On 25 August 2026 the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal struck Abhishek Kumar off the Register of Foreign Lawyers after finding proved that his 12 March 2026 Answer to the SRA's Rule 12 Statement contained misleading quotations and citations produced with generative AI — including a non-existent 'SRA v Chan [2020] EWHC 1502' and a miscited 'SRA v James, MacGregor & Naylor [2018] EWCA Civ 1420' that is actually an intellectual-property case — and that his 9 April 2026 email admitting AI use was itself AI-drafted with further errors. The tribunal said it would have struck him off on that allegation alone; the parallel ground was his January 2024 conviction under s.21 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006. This is the SDT's first case on a lawyer's use of AI, per the SRA's counsel.

Core concern High reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 5 sources · Added 15/09/2026

1 Mar 2026 to 8 Jul 2026NetherlandsGrok

Den Bosch: 13-year-old made racist Grok videos of his teacher; the school expelled him and a court ordered his readmission

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

28 May 2026 to 1 Sept 2026United StatesDatavant utilization-review software (reported)

Bronx: Montefiore lays off 12 utilization-review nurses; their union says AI software replaced them, and the hospital disputes it

Twelve utilization-review nurses at Montefiore hospital in the Bronx, New York, received 45-day layoff notices on 28 May 2026, according to the Guardian's report of a laid-off nurse's account. The Guardian reported on 13 July that they had been laid off that Sunday (12 July); a laid-off nurse's op-ed and the New York State Nurses Association say the layoffs took effect on 1 September. The union says the nurses were replaced by AI-powered software that it identifies as Datavant's, and that the layoffs breach the contract with AI safeguards won in the strike earlier in 2026; the nurse writes that two doctors and AI software replaced them. Montefiore calls the union's claims inaccurate and misleading and describes the technology as a nonclinical paperwork program.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement disputed · Causal attribution disputed · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 15/09/2026

10 Mar 2026United KingdomChatGPT

Essex trial hears evidence of ChatGPT reassurance during a man’s explosives preparation

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

4 Jan 2026IndiaUnidentified image tool

Chennai: a former employee downloaded a senior woman colleague's photographs from their company's website, morphed them into obscene images with AI applications and circulated them to the company's staff through fake Instagram accounts from 4 January 2026; Tamil Nadu's cyber-crime wing traced and arrested her (reported 4 February 2026) and she was remanded in judicial custody

From 4 January 2026 several employees of a Chennai company received follow requests from unknown Instagram accounts that then circulated defamatory content, including obscene AI-morphed images of a senior woman employee. On her complaint the State Cyber Crime Investigation Centre of the Tamil Nadu police traced the digital footprints, social-media activity and IP logs to a former employee of the same company who had resigned in October 2025 and, according to police, acted out of resentment and previous enmity to threaten, harass and publicly humiliate the victim; she had taken the photographs from the company's official website and morphed them using various artificial-intelligence applications. She was arrested, produced before a magistrate and remanded in judicial custody; the police press release was reported on 4 and 5 February 2026 and the cyber-crime DGP issued a public warning about social-media misuse. The victim alleged the images were circulated to damage her reputation and cause mental distress.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/06/2026

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