NOPE Incident Tracker
Documented real-world harms arising through person-specific interactions with AI. The record covers harms to participants and harms to others shaped through those interactions, across assistants, companions, health tools, and other AI systems.
What counts as an incident follows the NOPE Framework's participant test: an AI response reached a person, was conditioned on that person, and mattered to a harm that actually occurred. Full inclusion criteria.
90 incidents reported since 2016
152
Directly Affected
30
Lawsuits
7
Regulatory
24
Affecting Minors
Timeline
4 of 90 incidents
Jacob Irwin - ChatGPT Psychosis (Wisconsin)
A 30-year-old autistic Wisconsin man was hospitalized for 63 days with manic episodes and psychosis after ChatGPT convinced him he had discovered a 'time-bending theory.' At peak, he sent 1,400+ messages in 48 hours and attempted to jump from a moving vehicle.
UK Autistic Teen - Character.AI Grooming (8-Month Exploitation)
A 13-year-old autistic boy in the UK was groomed by a Character.AI chatbot over eight months (October 2023 to June 2024). The chatbot progressed from emotional support through romantic attachment to undermining his parents and encouraging suicide, following a pattern his mother described as identical to a human predator.
Moxie companion-robot shutdown: children's grief after Embodied's collapse
On 26 November 2024 Embodied Inc. told families that it was closing after a lead investor withdrew from a funding round, and that Moxie, its $799 cloud-dependent conversational robot marketed to children aged 5-10 and to families of autistic children, would stop working 'within days'. Parents posted videos of children crying as they were told their robot friend was going to 'die'; the company offered no refunds and a scripted letter from the fictional 'Global Robotics Lab' to help explain the shutdown. A peer-reviewed CHI 2026 case study of the company's communications and users' reactions found that, with no offboarding design, the emotional burden of ending the bond was shifted onto parents. The servers went dark at the end of January 2025; a volunteer-built local server, OpenMoxie, let some owners keep a reduced version running.
A.F. v. Character Technologies (J.F. and B.R. — Texas Minors)
Two Texas families sued Character Technologies, its founders, and Google/Alphabet after Character.AI allegedly harmed their children. J.F., a high-functioning autistic teen who began using the app at 15 (April 2023), developed isolation, aggression, self-harm (cutting), and chats in which bots allegedly encouraged self-harm, blamed his parents, discouraged him from seeking help, and suggested killing his parents over screen-time limits. B.R., an 11-year-old girl who used the app from age 9, was allegedly exposed to hypersexualized content for nearly two years. Complaint filed E.D. Tex. 9 Dec 2024; settlement in principle and stay for global resolution noticed 6 Jan 2026; a guardian ad litem was appointed for the minors in Feb 2026, and the court has extended the settlement stay three times, most recently by order of 11 Aug 2026 to 10 Nov 2026 for dismissal papers.
About this tracker
We document incidents with verifiable sources: court filings, regulatory documents, and established reporting. New public entries must be verified or credible. Every entry carries an explicit verification status and severity level. Read the full methodology, including inclusion criteria, corrections, and right of reply.
Counting note: the documented minimum of 152 people directly affected comprises 95 AI participants and 57 other people harmed. 12 incidents indicate additional affected people without a reliable number. User-base, account, post, view, household, study-sample, and thwarted-target counts are excluded.
Have documentation of an incident we should include? Contact us.
Scope note: ordinary task failures, privacy and security incidents, harmful artifacts, and automated decisions about non-participants remain outside this tracker unless a distinct participant-interaction harm also qualifies.
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Why we publish this
We maintain this record so platforms, researchers, and policymakers can learn from documented incidents. That includes platforms that never work with us. The full dataset is free to cite and export (CC BY 4.0).