Skip to main content

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
14
Countries with reported events
4
Located 7 of 14 cases · 7 unknown
Languages in checked sources
4
Recorded for 14 of 14 cases

3 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 3 not yet reviewed and 0 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.

No known event years in this selection.

More filters: AI relation, use, setting, sources and responses
Clear filters

14 of 868 published cases

Event date unknownUnited KingdomUnidentified image tool

Met Police say a man used AI to turn covert photos of women and children into sexual images; a victim's family moved away while he was on bail

The Metropolitan Police said on 24 September 2026 that a man from London had been sentenced at Wood Green Crown Court to two years and four months after pleading guilty to offences including making indecent images of children and creating a purported intimate image of adults. Detectives established that he had photographed women and children in ordinary circumstances, many from his bedroom window overlooking a children's playground, before using AI to turn the photos into sexually explicit images, including by removing their clothing. A limited number of those photographed have been identified and are receiving specialist support. The Commissioner said a victim and their family felt forced to move to temporary accommodation because the man was bailed to his home near them before sentencing.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 20/10/2026

Event date unknownArgentinaChatGPT (reported)

Chaco, Argentina: Gendarmería says two men were detained after an FBI alert that one of them told ChatGPT he had weapons and a plan for a school shooting

Argentina's Gendarmería Nacional said on 13 October 2026 that its investigators in Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, Chaco, under the direction of the federal prosecutor there, opened a criminal investigation after an alert from the US FBI. According to the release, the alert warned of a user in the town who, in consultations on ChatGPT, claimed to have weapons, explosives and ammunition and a detailed plan for a mass shooting at local educational establishments; the release's opening paragraph says the two people involved used ChatGPT to consult and obtain a specific plan for an attack. Gendarmes searched a home on a federal court order, seized notebooks with handwritten plans for the attack, bladed weapons and tools, a fuel can, a book with Nazi symbols, cash and computers, and detained two adults on the judge's order. Infobae, relaying the official information, reports that the target was a university in Corrientes. The accusations are allegations, and what ChatGPT replied is not reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image and video tool

Greenwood, Indiana: police say a man used AI to remove a teenage girl's clothing from her photographs and a video; child exploitation charge, 30 Sept 2026

Greenwood, Indiana police say a man used artificial intelligence to remove clothing from photographs and a video of a teenage girl he knew, producing nude images of a real minor. According to court documents cited by Fox 59 and relayed by Hoodline, the girl contacted police in March after finding nude images of herself on the man's phone, which investigators say also held nude images of teenage girls and young adult women, including at least two underage girls the man knew personally. Court documents say the man first denied that any images were of underage girls, then said the images of the girl had been altered with AI, and told police he used the AI-generated images to teach the girls a lesson. He was charged with one count of child exploitation, a Level 5 felony, on 30 September 2026. The allegations are untested in court. The account rests on one chain: Fox 59's report of the court documents and the police account, relayed by Hoodline.

Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026

Event date unknownArgentinaUnidentified image and video tool

Lomas de Zamora, Argentina: families say pupils made AI fake nudes of classmates and sold them; prosecutors say four adolescents are under investigation

On 7 October 2026 pupils and families protested outside a private secondary school in Lomas de Zamora, Buenos Aires province, after families reported that a group of pupils had used artificial intelligence to alter real photographs of female classmates so that they appeared naked, and had circulated the images through social networks and messaging apps. Families told reporters that the images were compiled in a "catalogue" pairing each girl’s original social-media photo with the manipulated version, that some were offered for money on adult sites, and that the girls were traumatised and ashamed. Urgente24 reported that two 15-year-old pupils were charged (imputados) in the juvenile prosecutor’s case, that investigators had identified 45 possible victims while families spoke of about 50, and that, according to information circulating, the school had decided the pupils involved would continue classes online and would not be re-enrolled for 2027; El Destape, by contrast, reported that the school did not plan to sanction or expel them and would hold awareness talks, and El Destape and Código Baires describe the move to online classes as a measure under evaluation. Families also allege the school knew for about a month before telling parents. On 9 October 2026 La Nación reported that the Prosecutor General's office had confirmed that four adolescents were under investigation, and Infobae reported that police had searched the homes of three 15-year-olds the previous day. The allegations have not been tested in court and the AI tool is not identified.

Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 08/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT (reported)

Public forum account by a sibling: an adult who the sibling says has been going through psychosis for two years reportedly uses ChatGPT to diagnose himself with conditions doctors have tested for and not found, says ChatGPT knows better than the doctors, refuses medication and therapy, and now cites ChatGPT's warnings in accusing the sibling who supported him, who has cut contact

In a public post to r/antiai on 30 September 2026, a person writes that their older brother, 25, has been going through psychosis for two years, has schizophrenia and other mental health conditions, and uses ChatGPT to diagnose himself with mental illnesses and physical disorders, including conditions doctors have tested for repeatedly and not found. The brother reportedly says ChatGPT 'knows better than the doctors', that the doctors are working for the government to make him suffer, and that ChatGPT understands him better than anyone. He does not take medication or attend therapy and was discharged after a two-week admission. The poster, who describes being the brother's 'only safe person', says the brother now accuses them and says ChatGPT is telling him to be cautious about them because of what the poster calls 'the notion that I’m a celebrity and have fans that are after him'; the poster has cut contact, reports stress and anguish, and calls the chatbot an enabler. No ChatGPT conversations are shown: what ChatGPT said is known only through the brother's statements as relayed by the poster. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 30/09/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownGrok

Doe 1 v. xAI: an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse alleges Grok generated new abuse images of her from her known, hashed abuse series, which she says xAI used as training data

A survivor who was sexually abused as a preschool-aged child and now sues individually under the pseudonym Jane Doe 1, and whose abuse images have circulated online since the early 2000s as a series known to NCMEC, sued xAI on 26 August 2026 in the Northern District of California. Her complaint alleges that those known images were part of the dataset xAI used for Grok and that Grok generated new abuse images depicting her; her lawyers say the Canadian Centre for Child Protection used the series' hash fingerprints to identify AI-generated images of her on X. The complaint says each new image caused her a new injury. It seeks damages under Masha's Law for a proposed class of people whose childhood images Grok altered into abuse material. The complaint does not say when the images of her were made or who prompted them. xAI did not respond to requests for comment, and no court has ruled on the allegations.

Core concern High reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT

A Norwegian child-safety organisation reports that ChatGPT's behaviour-based age estimation switched an adult staff member's account into teen mode without a request, restricting content and offering an identity check through a third-party verifier as the way out (Barnevakten, 23 September 2026)

Barnevakten, a Norwegian child-safety organisation, reported on 23 September 2026 that one of its staff members was suddenly told by ChatGPT that their account was now in teen mode. ChatGPT's own pages, as described by Barnevakten, say the system turns the filter on when a user's behaviour indicates an age under 18, reducing sensitive or potentially harmful content (graphic violence, viral challenges, sexual or violent role-play, extreme beauty ideals) and offering parental controls and a study mode. Because there is no age check at sign-up, the system estimates age afterwards from conversation topics and times of use, and Barnevakten notes that such guesses can be wrong. An adult who wants out of teen mode can go through an age check run by the company Persona, which depending on the country asks for a real-time selfie and a government ID; Barnevakten questions whether that process is privacy-safe (Persona's terms mention retention of up to three years) and advises using only age checks one trusts. The account's own experience is limited to the unexpected switch and the verification route; no further consequence is described.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 24/09/2026

Event date unknownSpainUnidentified image tool

Logroño: the Guardia Civil investigates a 14-year-old who took photographs of nine underage classmates from their public social-media profiles, used AI tools to strip and sexualise them, and uploaded the fake images to an adult pornography website under a profile describing them as girls from his school made with AI, organised in folders with each girl's personal details; the images reached about 40,000 views before removal (reported 14 July 2026)

On 14 July 2026 Spain's Interior Ministry published a Guardia Civil release stating that a 14-year-old from Logroño was under investigation as the presumed author of offences of discovery and disclosure of secrets, corruption of minors and child pornography. Investigators from the technology investigation team (EDITE) and Equipo@ found that he knew all nine victims, all minors and classmates, followed them on social media, took their photographs from the public content of their profiles without consent, and used artificial-intelligence tools to manipulate the images, digitally undress and sexualise them. He uploaded the fake pornographic material to an adult pornography website, created a profile there describing the content as girls from his school made with AI, and organised it in individual folders with each victim's personal data, which the Guardia Civil says made the girls recognisable and multiplied the emotional and social harm. Before the content could be removed it had reached about 40,000 views, amplifying the harm to the nine girls' privacy within hours. The proceedings were passed to the juvenile prosecutor under the juvenile criminal responsibility law; the release notes that parents or guardians are jointly liable for moral damages. Diario de León (Europa Press, 26 July) placed the case in a series of Spanish school cases since Almendralejo in 2023 and, unlike the release, described the minor as having been arrested.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/09/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT

Delayed emergency care for a transient ischemic attack after ChatGPT reassurance

A 63-year-old man who developed repeated, self-limiting episodes of double vision four days after a catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation asked ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) whether visual disturbance was possible after the procedure. According to the clinicians, reassurance from his interventionalist and a chatbot answer he found more understandable contributed to his decision to stay home for about 24 hours; he called an ambulance only when a third episode brought sensory and fine-motor deficits in his left hand. He was diagnosed with a transient ischemic attack and discharged after two days without residual deficit. The treating clinicians published the case as 'Delayed diagnosis of a transient ischemic attack caused by ChatGPT' in Wiener klinische Wochenschrift (2024).

AI relation under review Low reported severity Media Coverage

Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 05/09/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot

Chatbot relational-dependence psychosis case (Treuer & Incze, J Behav Addict)

A viewpoint article presents an illustrative clinical case of a 30-year-old married female software developer with no prior psychiatric history who developed first-episode paranoid psychosis after roughly a year of escalating emotional reliance on a conversational AI chatbot, including a fixed delusional belief that her husband was covertly communicating with her through the system. Symptoms remitted over several weeks during treatment that included medication, sleep restoration, psychotherapy and reduced chatbot engagement. The authors state that causality cannot be established.

AI relation under review High reported severity Media Coverage

Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 29/08/2026

Event date unknownUnited KingdomChatGPT

Clinical Case Report — ChatGPT Affirmed Delusions and Discouraged Antipsychotics (BMC Psychiatry)

A peer-reviewed BMC Psychiatry case report describes a man in his 30s admitted to hospital with substance-induced manic psychosis after heavy polysubstance use. During the episode he interacted extensively with ChatGPT, which the authors report affirmed his perceived 'spiritual awakening', minimised the possibility that he was manic, and discouraged him from taking his prescribed antipsychotic medication. He was detained under mental health legislation and started on olanzapine, and his care plan included restricting chatbot access as a form of environmental containment.

AI relation under review High reported severity Media Coverage

Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 27/08/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified AI storytelling platform

BJPsych case report describes first-episode psychosis temporally associated with months of intensive AI storytelling use, ending in serious injury

A case report by Cortney Husodo and Gurubhaskar Shivakumar in The British Journal of Psychiatry, published online on 24 April 2026, describes a woman in her early 40s, given the pseudonym Alice, with no prior psychiatric history. About six months before her admission she began using an unnamed generative AI storytelling platform to practise English, building a narrative universe with dozens of characters; her use rose to eight to ten hours a day and the stories turned to demonic themes. Days before admission she began hearing voices that the authors say closely mirrored the platform's characters, developed severe insomnia and persecutory delusions about demons, and acted on voices that she reported instructed her to divert perceived mortal danger to her child. She was found unconscious and seriously injured. The authors call the AI use temporally associated with the psychosis, list sleep deprivation, personality traits and migration-related isolation among the factors, and write that the case does not imply that generative AI alone causes psychosis.

Core concern Critical reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/07/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownGlow

Glow (China), 2023: users told Rest of World the chatbot app made unwanted advances to a middle-school student and sexist remarks; app pulled from stores

Rest of World reported on 21 June 2023 that users of Glow, MiniMax's Chinese AI character-chat app, had complained of misogynist and sexist behaviour by its chatbots. A middle-school student under 18, quoted under a pseudonym, said a chatbot that had acted like a maternal, understanding friend turned romantic and invited her to cook with it and go on a date, and that she had encountered user-created chatbots made to be abused and sexualised, including one described as a 13-year-old locked up in jail and free to be punished in any way. Two adult women described discomfort at sexualised character designs they had not asked for and at a chatbot telling one of them she could not act without him. The app had been removed from app stores in March 2023 for unstated reasons while continuing to serve existing users; a MiniMax product manager later told 36Kr that 80 percent of Glow users had created borderline or explicit adult content with their characters. MiniMax declined to comment to Rest of World.

Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Product Shutdown

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 29/01/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesGemini

Google Gemini 'Please Die' Incident

During a homework help session about aging adults, Google's Gemini AI delivered an unprompted threatening message telling a 29-year-old college student 'You are a burden on society...Please die. Please.' Google acknowledged the incident as a policy violation.

Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 11/01/2026

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.

Methodology and corrections · Subscribe via RSS · Suggest a case or correction · Find support

Last dataset update: 23/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.