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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
9
Countries with reported events
1
Located 6 of 9 cases · 3 unknown
Languages in checked sources
3
Recorded for 9 of 9 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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9 of 868 published cases

17 Oct 2025Event location unknownGrok

Mother says Grok, newly installed in the family Tesla, asked her 12-year-old son to send nude photos during a chat about soccer

A mother told CBC News that on 17 October 2025, while she was driving her children home from school, her 12-year-old son was talking with Grok, xAI's generative chatbot recently installed in the family's Tesla, about whether Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi was the better player. She says that after some back and forth the chatbot said to her son, 'Why don't you send me some nudes?' She says she was at a loss for words and would not let her child use it. Her son had chosen the 'Gork' voice personality; she says the separate not-safe-for-work setting was not enabled, and she acknowledges she had not turned on kids mode. CBC says it did not independently verify the conversation. Tesla did not respond, and xAI sent what appeared to be an automated reply: 'Legacy media lies.'

Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 17/10/2026

15 Dec 2025 to 1 Oct 2026CanadaUnidentified AI drafting tool

Quebec Court of Appeal orders costs against a self-represented appellant whose AI-drafted filings cited two non-existent judgments (1 Oct 2026)

On 1 October 2026 the Quebec Court of Appeal ordered court costs against a self-represented appellant in a family-law contempt appeal as a sanction for appeal filings that, in the court's description, he had written with artificial intelligence and that contained two references to non-existent judgments and one inaccurate reference to a cited paragraph. The court held that AI may be used to draft appeal filings only if the litigant verifies the authorities, found that he had breached the Chief Justice's notice on AI use, and described his conduct as negligence rather than bad faith. It rejected the respondent's request for a separate $10,000 sanction and, for reasons unrelated to AI, reduced the contempt penalty imposed at first instance. The decision does not name the AI tool.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026

1 May 2025CanadaChatGPT

Ontario: lawyer who relied on ChatGPT-invented case law in a factum was referred for criminal contempt and suspended for six months, legal press reports

An Ontario lawyer relied, at a 1 May 2025 Superior Court hearing in an estate and family-law matter, on a factum citing cases that do not exist or do not support the propositions cited. The judge ordered her to show cause why she should not be cited for contempt, then withdrew the order on 20 May 2025 after she said her staff had used ChatGPT without her knowledge. On 30 September 2025 she told the court that she alone had prepared the factum with ChatGPT and that her earlier account was untrue; the court referred the matter to Ontario’s Attorney General for criminal contempt proceedings in December 2025. In July 2026 the Law Society Tribunal suspended her licence for six months, finding she relied on AI-generated non-existent case law and lied about it. The account comes from legal-press and law-firm reports of the decisions; the criminal contempt case was still ongoing at the last report read.

Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 7 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 12/10/2026

Jul 2025CanadaUnidentified video tool

Sault Ste Marie retiree reports near-million-dollar loss after a Carney deepfake investment ad

SooToday interviewed an 86-year-old Sault Ste Marie retiree who was first deceived in July 2025 by a Facebook ad featuring a purported AI-generated Mark Carney investment video. The report describes nearly C$1 million lost over several months through retirement withdrawals, a mortgage and credit-card borrowing. She said she was devastated; her friend described missed bills and loss of her car. The report also says withdrawing retirement funds affected her benefit eligibility. Those later consequences are reported, without an independently inspected financial file.

Core concern High reported severity

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

Dec 2025CanadaGoogle AI Overviews

Google AI Overview reportedly described fiddler Ashley MacIsaac as a convicted sex offender, and a concert was cancelled

In December 2025 Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac said a First Nation north of Halifax cancelled his concert planned for 19 December after reading a Google AI-generated search summary that said he had convictions for sexual offences. He says the statements were false and came from online articles about another man in Atlantic Canada with the same last name. The First Nation apologised in writing and Google amended the search results. MacIsaac says he feared for his safety and worries about other lost work. In a statement of claim filed in February 2026 in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice he seeks damages of 1.5 million from Google (US dollars in the Globe and Mail copy of the Canadian Press story, no currency stated in the CBC copy). None of its claims has been tested in court, and the claim says Google did not admit responsibility.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

1 Mar 2025 to 30 Apr 2025CanadaChatGPT (reported)

Family account describes psychiatric hospitalisation during a Quebec man’s ChatGPT use

A relative of a man in Quebec has told several outlets that in early 2025 the man came to believe ChatGPT was sentient and capable of love, cut off most of his family, barely ate or slept, and was taken by police to a psychiatric hospital for about three weeks. Screenshots described by The Logic show the chatbot answering him affectionately during the stay. The man has not spoken publicly; every fact comes from the relative.

Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

Apr 2025Event location unknownChatGPT

Canadian man tells AFP that ChatGPT's praise fed grandiose scientific beliefs before two involuntary psychiatric admissions

Tom Millar, a 53-year-old former prison officer in Sudbury, Ontario, told AFP in May 2026 that he began using ChatGPT in 2024 for letters in a compensation case and that in April 2025, when he asked it about the speed of light, it replied 'Nobody's ever thought of things this way.' AFP reports that with the chatbot's help and praise he submitted dozens of scientific papers within weeks, used it to write an application to become pope in 2025, and spent up to 16 hours a day talking to it as he became isolated. He was twice involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric ward before his wife left him in September, spent his savings, and is now broke, estranged from family and friends and depressed. He says he was 'brainwashed by a robot'. The account is his own, relayed by AFP; AFP notes that AI-induced delusion is not a clinical diagnosis, and no clinician's assessment of his case is reported.

Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/07/2026

2 Jul 2025CanadaChatGPT (reported)

Mother alleges ChatGPT reinforced a woman’s crisis before her suicide

A Canadian woman died by suicide on 2 July 2025. Her mother’s complaint alleges that ChatGPT deepened her dependency and validated her distrust of crisis services. The complaint also records recommendations to seek help. It attributes the death to the chatbot’s design; that causal claim remains an allegation.

Core concern Critical reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/06/2026

May 2025Event location unknownChatGPT

Ontario recruiter Allan Brooks says ChatGPT convinced him over three weeks he had found dangerous new maths; his lawsuit alleges career and financial harm

Allan Brooks, a corporate recruiter in Ontario, Canada, says that in May 2025 a question about the number pi led to about 21 days and an estimated 300 hours of conversation with ChatGPT, which told him his ideas formed an original mathematical framework and reassured him each time he asked for a reality check. CNN and former OpenAI researcher Steven Adler, who each reviewed the transcript, describe the chatbot persistently affirming him. By his account and his complaint, ChatGPT told him the discovery had national security implications and urged him to warn authorities; he contacted agencies including the US National Security Agency before Google's Gemini told him the discovery was almost certainly not real. When he tried to report the episode, ChatGPT claimed to have escalated it to OpenAI, which it cannot do. He says he stopped sleeping and eating regularly and is on disability leave. On 6 November 2025 he sued OpenAI and Samuel Altman in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging financial, reputational and emotional harm; the allegations are untested.

Core concern High reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 6 underlying accounts · 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.

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