2026ChinaUnidentified mushroom-identification tool
A man in Zhuji, Zhejiang province, gathered wild mushrooms near his home, photographed them and asked an AI tool whether they were poisonous, according to a Science and Technology Daily item carried by Qingdao Daily on 20 August 2026 (citing Zhuji Daily) and reports by the World Journal (20 August) and Sing Tao (21 August) citing Dushi Kuaibao's Chengshi app. The reports say the tool answered that the mushrooms were non-toxic and he cooked and ate them at noon. That afternoon he developed severe abdominal pain, repeated watery diarrhoea and aching arms; at Zhuji People's Hospital his creatine kinase was reported at 28,771 U/L, about 100 times the normal value, with acidosis and raised lactate, and doctors diagnosed rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney failure. He was moved to the intensive care unit, treated to remove the toxin and protect organ function, and has since been discharged. The AI tool is not named, its output is not reproduced, and the account rests on one hospital-and-local-press account relayed by two chains.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 10/10/2026
Jun 2026ChinaUnidentified mushroom-identification tool
A family from Wuhan, Hubei province, gathered wild mushrooms resembling the edible termite mushroom (jizong) during a mountain outing in June 2026 and, according to a Guangming Online post carried by The Paper on 5 July 2026 and an Asahi Shimbun report of 6 July citing the Changjiang Daily, ran an AI identification tool on them. The tool returned a "non-poisonous" result and the family cooked and ate the mushrooms. According to the Guangming Online post, all three family members vomited soon after the meal and again before dawn the next day; they were admitted to Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, where the 9-year-old child was moved to the paediatric intensive care unit the same afternoon. The post says the child had amatoxin poisoning that progressed to the most severe grade, with acute liver failure, hepatic encephalopathy and fluid in the chest and abdomen, and went home after eight days in hospital. The AI tool is not named, its output is not reproduced, and the account comes from one reporting chain.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/10/2026
7 Sept 2026United StatesUnidentified image tool
Granite Post reported on 5 October 2026 that the New Hampshire Senate Republicans paid Meta to show Facebook and Instagram users an image of Leonard Bell, the Democratic candidate for state Senate District 18 and the only Black candidate for state Senate in New Hampshire this year, laughing in a leather armchair buried in cash and wearing gold chains, a large ring and a watch. According to the outlet, Meta labelled the ad "Digitally created" and its detail page states that the media was created or edited with AI; Bell’s face appears to have been taken from a family snapshot. Bell told the outlet that everything in the image is false other than his face. Citing Meta’s Ad Library, the outlet says three ads from 7 September put the image on New Hampshire screens 39,000 to 50,000 times. The outlet describes the image as a racial stereotype, and a Democratic co-sponsor of New Hampshire’s 2024 deepfake law called it a racist caricature. The Senate Republicans did not respond to questions.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026
3 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)
In a public GitHub issue filed on 3 October 2026, a Claude Code user on Windows reports that a sub-agent, while cleaning up its own scratch files during research work, ran a command that included an unintended recursive delete of the 8.3 short-name alias of their home folder. The issue says no confirmation or permission prompt was recorded, that the command was moved to the background after a 120-second timeout, and that the deletion continued for about 50 minutes after the agent's stop call reported success. According to the issue, the agent told the main session it had killed the command and that the profile looked intact, having checked only top-level folder names. The author reports about 116 GB removed, including roughly 40 top-level Documents folders holding work described as months of work, developer toolchains and credentials, with recovery ongoing and incomplete. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated; Anthropic had not replied in the thread when it was read.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026
Sept 2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool (suspected)
Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali, wife of former Malaysian prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, died on 28 September 2026 aged 100. BuzzKini reported on 30 September that a TikTok account had posted a video of Mahathir grieving beside her body, edited to show a woman dancing next to him, and another clip of the moment he raised his hands in prayer edited with dancing movements while seated in a wheelchair. BuzzKini says the edits are believed to have been made with AI, and that many social media users condemned them and asked the regulator and police to act. On 2 October the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) said it was examining social media content believed to use AI to manipulate footage of Mahathir in mourning, had contacted the platforms concerned, and that action could follow under the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 if a breach was found.
Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 03/10/2026
23 Feb 2026 to 25 Feb 2026ItalyUnidentified voice-cloning tool
On 23 February 2026 Paolo Molesini, then chairman of Fideuram (the private-banking subsidiary of Intesa Sanpaolo), received a WhatsApp message from an unknown number from someone claiming to be Intesa's chief executive Carlo Messina, announcing a confidential acquisition that had to be executed through Fideuram. The same day a caller presenting as a lawyer of A&O Shearman whom Molesini knew, whose voice ANSA, Il Fatto Quotidiano and Corriere della Sera, reporting from the Milan court papers, describe as created with artificial intelligence (today.it, which also cites the seizure decree, writes that the court papers do not yet answer whether the voice was imitated), had him sign a confidentiality agreement and sent eleven payment instructions; Fideuram's treasury head was separately contacted by someone posing as Fideuram's CEO. Between 23 and 25 February eleven transfers totalling about 95 million euros went to accounts in Portugal and at Bank of China; the bank's alarm systems and the Milan prosecutors recovered about 40-42 million from China and 13 million seized in Portugal, leaving at least 36 million (39.5 million per the court papers) missing after conversion into cryptocurrency. Molesini, who Corriere writes is not under investigation, resigned as chairman on 12 March 2026, which Fideuram announced as being for personal reasons; a 48-year-old Israeli citizen is under investigation as a member of the gang.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 8 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 30/09/2026
Jul 2026South KoreaUnidentified image tool
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
12 Jun 2026RussiaChatGPT
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