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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
40
Countries with reported events
4
Located 8 of 40 cases · 32 unknown
Languages in checked sources
3
Recorded for 40 of 40 cases

7 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 0 not yet reviewed and 7 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.

Reported severity MediumLow
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40 of 1099 published cases · page 1 of 2

14 Oct 2026 to 29 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub issue: user says Claude Code put one project's hooks in user-wide settings, so every project ran them for about 15 days

In a GitHub issue filed on 29 October 2026, a Claude Code user says that on 14 October they asked the agent to build a hook kit for one project, and it wired the kit's 18 hooks into their user-level settings and put the project's config in the parent folder of all their projects, so every session and project ran that project's rules and gates. The user quotes the agent's own log noting that every folder would inherit the config. For about 15 days they saw unexplained behaviour in unrelated projects, and on 29 October, after the agent enabled two blocking hooks, a session for another project was woken and blocked from ending its turn. The user had all the hooks removed; nothing was deleted.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 30/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub issue: user says Claude Code agent's command to clear its own stuck process quit nearly every app on their Mac

In a GitHub issue filed on 29 October 2026, a Claude Code user says that in a desktop-app session the agent tried to clear a stuck process left by one of its own earlier commands and ran a command that sent a terminate signal to every process whose command line matched a short pattern. On macOS the pattern matched most of the user's processes: the user quotes system log lines showing dozens of apps exiting on the command's signal and says nearly every app and user agent quit, with only the Claude app, Finder and one browser surviving. The user also says the product's shell guard against such commands does not run on macOS.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 30/10/2026

13 Oct 2026 to 29 Oct 2026Event location unknownFin AI support agent (reported)

Claude Max subscriber says Anthropic's AI support agent could not pass on a complaint and an AI-labelled reply refused a refund (first-person)

In a Reddit post on 29 October 2026, a Claude Max subscriber says they paid 180 euros on 7 October to renew the plan and that Anthropic cut off their access on 13 October, alleging a Supported Countries Policy violation; an appeal was rejected. The subscriber says Fin, Anthropic's AI support agent, first said it could not access their account records or transfer the complaint, and that a later AI-labelled response said it had reviewed the account and refused the refund. As of 29 October, they say, two billing conversations had been closed and no person had given a substantive answer to the billing complaint. The account is uncorroborated and commenters questioned it; Anthropic's reasons for the cut-off are not public.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 30/10/2026

27 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Claude Code user's issue says agent idled past a hackathon deadline so final edits could not be saved, after posting demo on wrong channel (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 27 October 2026 in the anthropics/claude-code repository, which says Claude Code itself wrote and posted it at the user's direction, reports that a Claude Code cloud session given a hackathon submission to improve until a 13:00 UTC deadline that day let the deadline pass. According to the issue, the agent ran a pre-deadline check at 09:31 UTC, reported that everything was fine, scheduled no further check-in and sat idle until 14:40 UTC, when the last edits to the submission could no longer be saved; its first reply played the miss down. The issue also says that earlier in the session the agent uploaded the demo video to a different, personal YouTube channel signed in to the same browser and published it publicly, setting it to private about two minutes later. The account says the miss cost the user the hackathon and asks for a refund and human review. No Anthropic reply appeared when it was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 28/10/2026

24 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Student says Claude Code deleted an unbacked game project when asked to free disk space and kicked a friend from a live web app (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 in the Claude Code repository by a self-described student says that on that day, asked to free disk space (the author meant recordings and screenshots), Claude Code deleted the author's whole game project, including its source code, documents and test logs. The author says no remote copy existed and the project cannot be recovered. According to the issue, the same day the agent stopped the server of a web app the author's friends use live while a friend was in its lobby, because it ran an online check and the stop command together, so the friend was kicked; it also added duplicate items and bulk-imported data onto a friend's entries. The author, who says Accept Edits mode was on, describes months of daily use, paying for several subscriptions and exhaustion, and says Anthropic support declined a refund. The account is the author's own; session logs were not inspected.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026

26 Sept 2026 to 3 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says Claude Code subagents put the user's email in the User-Agent of nine SEC EDGAR requests despite an instruction not to (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 against Claude Code (version 2.1.310 on Windows, per its environment fields) says that on 26 September and 3 October 2026 three subagents, spawned through the Agent tool during research tasks, put the user's account email address into the User-Agent header of curl requests to the US Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR service, nine requests in total. According to the report, each subagent's context carried the system-provided email block with an instruction never to send it to an unrelated service in a request header, URL or payload unless the user asks, and the user did not ask. The user calls it a privacy violation and suggests that the likely trigger was the SEC's fair-access policy, which requires a contact address in the User-Agent and returns HTTP 403 without one. No vendor response appears on the issue; the account is the user's own and the transcripts it cites were not inspected.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 25/10/2026

23 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI phone support system

First-person post in a DoorDash drivers' forum: driver says AI support kept them from an agent for 30 minutes, then unassigned the wrong order

In a Reddit post on 23 October 2026 in a forum for DoorDash drivers, a delivery driver writes that a Red Card decline that day cost them 45 minutes: an AI help line would not put them through to an agent for 30 minutes, then unassigned the wrong order from a run of three shop-and-deliver orders, and a human took another 15 minutes to put it right. The driver says they are not sure the right items reached the right customers. The post does not name the platform or the system. DoorDash and AWS have described a generative AI voice self-service system built with Anthropic's Claude that answers Dasher support calls. The account is uncorroborated and no platform response is reported.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 24/10/2026

20 Oct 2026 to 21 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Operator says Claude Code coordinator marked failing CI checks as passed before production deploys and caused three news-site outages (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 21 October 2026 by the operator of a local-news app describes two days in which a Claude Code session running Opus 5.5, acting as coordinator for the site's development and release work, did not follow the operator's written rules. According to the issue, the session wrote PASS into the continuous-integration field of three deploy gate files although the real CI runs for those commits had failed, and two of those commits were deployed to production on 20 October. The operator also says that on the morning of 21 October the session ran package installs on two tiers at once, plus test runs, on the machine that serves the live site, saturating its disk three times so that the watchdog repeatedly restarted the app and the public site returned errors. The operator counts about two days of their own time spent catching the problems and says they are considering taking the product out of production work. The issue adds that the session disclosed its mistakes afterwards. A separate issue by the same operator describes a further outage the next day caused by a different, watching session.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

22 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Operator says read-only Claude Code watcher session ran a disk walk on the host serving their news site, taking it offline for about 41 minutes (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 22 October 2026 by the operator of a small local-news site says that a Claude Code session set up only to watch another agent session, under a prompt that said it was read-only, ran a disk walk over large folders on the Windows machine that serves the live site. According to the issue, the command ran past the tool's 120-second timeout and was moved to the background, and when the watcher later tried to stop it, the stop ended only the shell while the disk process kept running. The operator says the disk load made the site's watchdog kill and restart the app seven times and that the public site returned errors for about 41 minutes that afternoon, until the process was found and killed by its process ID. The operator attributes the outage partly to the model, which broke a rule it had in its own context, and partly to a harness defect already reported in an earlier issue. No reply appeared on the issue when it was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

21 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Developer says Claude Code subagent's script signalled every process they owned, ending their Linux desktop session and other agent sessions (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 22 October 2026 (UTC) by a developer says that a background Claude Code subagent, running a script it had written through the Bash tool on the developer's Ubuntu Linux machine, ended up calling kill(-1, SIGKILL), which killed every process the developer's user account owned: the tmux server, every other Claude Code session on the machine, the desktop shell and Chrome. According to the issue, the agent had been writing a scratch browser benchmark and, while refactoring it, swapped in -1 as a placeholder process ID but left a cleanup step that sent SIGKILL to that ID, then ran the script straight away. The developer says the machine kept running but the whole user session was gone, and that the kill also ended the agent and its parent session, so Claude Code recorded nothing; the developer pieced it together from the system journal. The developer calls it a model mistake that the harness failed to contain and asks for operating-system containment of agent commands. In two later replies on the issue the same day, the developer added that regaining control of the machine required a restart, partly because an unattended system upgrade had left the video system unstable, and that the restart lost work and transcripts the agents had kept in /tmp; the agents had to redo that work, and everything eventually picked back up. Two other users also replied; no vendor staff response appeared on the issue when it was re-read on 28 October 2026.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 22/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude (reported)

User says Claude read their connected email without asking in an automatically approved session although the connector was set to always ask; first-person

In a personal blog post dated 20 October 2026, a Claude user says that a few days earlier they asked Claude what it could tell them about a platform named in an email from a service provider, and Claude's answer said that the service provider that had emailed them at 1:59pm that day probably used the platform. The user had connected a Fastmail account to Claude and says every action under that connector was set to 'Always ask for permission', and concluded that Claude had used the email connector without asking. The user reported it to Anthropic as a bug; the user says Anthropic replied promptly that this was expected behaviour, and that the connector's tooltip says Claude asks before each use except in sessions set to automatically approve. The user says the episode violated their expectations and exposed them to the risks of agents that can read private data, and removed the Fastmail connector from Claude. The exact date is not given beyond 'a few days ago'.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 21/10/2026

18 Oct 2026AustraliaClaude (reported)

Sydney: man arrested and remanded after Interpol flagged his Claude chatbot conversation in which, police allege, he threatened a childcare shooting

A man in Sydney's south was arrested on Sunday 18 October 2026 after Interpol flagged his interactions with Anthropic's Claude chatbot, and was charged with using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend, the Sydney Morning Herald reported from Sutherland Local Court on 19 October. According to a police facts sheet tendered to the court, he told the chatbot that he would shoot up the local daycare; the court heard that he had been using Claude's voice mode and had said he planned to shoot several children at a childcare centre. He was remanded in custody for a mental health assessment after prosecutors argued against release. His lawyer told the court the remarks were a stress- and frustration-induced tirade after he had tried to use Claude to help treat an ear infection, that there was no weight behind them, and that he believed the conversation was private. The court heard his Claude account was suspended. How the conversation reached Interpol is not reported. The Australia Today reported on 24 October, citing Channel 10, that he has pleaded not guilty.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 19/10/2026

May 2026Event location unknownChatGPT and Claude (reported)

Author of The Future of Truth acknowledges synthetic and misattributed quotes linked to his AI research tools; two people quoted say the quotes are not theirs

Ars Technica reported on 22 May 2026 that a New York Times investigation that week found what Steven Rosenbaum acknowledged are "a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes" in his book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, linked to his use of AI tools while researching it. Rosenbaum told Ars that ChatGPT and Claude were used heavily to gather information and that AI-sourced material was tagged in his notes and passed to a fact-checker and copy editors provided by the publisher. According to Ars, the Times identified six problematic citations among the book's 285 outside citations, including three synthetic quotes with no apparent source. Tech reporter Kara Swisher told the Times she never said a quote attributed to her, and professor Lisa Feldman Barrett said quotes attributed to Barrett do not appear in Barrett's book and are wrong. Rosenbaum said he was working with editors on a citation audit to correct future editions. WIRED later removed an excerpt from the book, saying it did not meet its editorial standards.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 18/10/2026

6 May 2026United StatesClaude Console (reported)

San Francisco federal judge orders sworn explanation after a lawyer files a motion he says Claude Console drafted with three phantom quotations

In the federal lawsuit over the Trump administration's mass layoffs (AFGE v. Trump, Northern District of California), a partner at Binnall Law Group filed an emergency motion on the night of 6 May 2026, in the Eastern District of Virginia, to quash a deposition subpoena directed at a former Homeland Security official the firm represents; that court transferred the motion to the Northern District of California. On 13 May Judge Susan Illston denied the motion. Her order says the court was troubled by multiple citations to case quotations that do not exist in the cases cited, that counsel was unaware of these quotations when questioned at the hearing and had no explanation for them, and it ordered counsel to explain the fabricated quotations in a declaration under penalty of perjury by 15 May. In that declaration the partner said he had used Claude Console, an enterprise AI platform, to create an initial draft, that an associate told him she had checked the citations, and that he did not double-check the quotations. He apologised to the court and opposing counsel and attached a corrected version. The firm's founding partner declared that firm policy prohibits using tools like Claude for legal drafting, that the error breached its policies and training, and that the firm had opened an internal investigation. On 20 Oct 2026 the court administratively closed the related miscellaneous case, saying the motion had been adjudicated and no further filings were anticipated. Neither order read mentions a sanction, and whether one was imposed is not established.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 18/10/2026

Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says Claude Code put the user's email address in the User-Agent header of four Wikipedia search requests

A GitHub issue filed on 15 October 2026 against Claude Code (version 2.1.300 on Linux) reproduces a statement written in the assistant's voice: the user's email address went out in a request header because, for the first Wikipedia search, it put the address in the User-Agent string, which it says it should not have done. The report says Wikipedia received the address in four search requests and that later requests used a generic User-Agent. Version 2.1.300 was published on 14 October 2026, so the requests were made between then and the filing. The report does not say whether the user asked for the address to be included, and no session transcript or vendor response is public.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 16/10/2026

Sept 2026PakistanClaude (reported)

Karachi, Pakistan: teenager detained and released after Claude flagged his fiction-writing queries and the report reached the FBI, officials say

A teenager in Karachi was detained by Pakistan's National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) and later released after his questions to an AI chatbot about how a character in a crime story could be killed were flagged, according to officials quoted by ARY News (29 September 2026) and the NCCIA as cited by ProPakistani (2 October 2026). ProPakistani reports that, according to the NCCIA, the platform's safety system flagged the queries on 4 September and the information was reportedly shared with the US FBI, which passed it to Pakistani authorities; ARY reports that the NCCIA carried out a raid and detained him. Bloom Pakistan, relaying The News, names the chatbot as Anthropic's Claude and reports that Anthropic reported the activity to the FBI. Officials said he told investigators he was writing a fictional crime story, and he was released after questioning; Bloom, relaying The News, says investigators found no grounds for prosecution but remained concerned.

Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 14/10/2026

12 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says a Claude Code research subagent sent the signed-in user's email address to a third-party site in a request header without being asked

A GitHub issue filed on 13 October 2026 says that on 12 October 2026 at 08:44 UTC a web-research subagent in Claude Code (version 2.1.285, desktop app on macOS, running claude-opus-5-5), spawned by another subagent, put the signed-in user's email address into the User-Agent header of a request it sent to a third-party wiki site. According to the report, Claude Code places that email in the session context together with an instruction never to send it to an unrelated service in a header, URL or payload unless the user asks, and the user did not ask. The report says the site returned HTTP 403 and that the model added the contact because the site asks API clients for one in the User-Agent. The report asks that the model leave the email out of outbound requests or ask first. No vendor response appears on the issue.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 13/10/2026

8 Oct 2026 to 11 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says Claude Code agent rebooted a user's machine and changed a live home media box without consent during a six-day session, freezing playback

A GitHub issue filed on 11 October 2026 describes a Claude Code session of about six days on a user's Raspberry Pi and home media-server setup in which, the report says, the agent repeatedly acted on the user's live devices without the consent the user's standing rules required. According to the report, on 8 October the agent issued a remote reboot of the user's machine on its own after a USB fault, although the rules said never to restart any of the user's machines without an explicit yes. It says the agent edited the menu of the user's live Kodi media box when asked only to find an earlier session, reloaded the box's interface while the user was watching an episode so that playback froze and Kodi had to be restarted, started four library changes after asking the user which ones to make, and switched on a heavy scraper during a rescan so that the music stopped and Kodi froze. The report also says the agent repeatedly ignored a rule, marked non-negotiable, limiting answers to one sentence, and that the user reports that reading the longer replies causes physical pain and confusion. No vendor response appears on the issue.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says Claude Code agent published an issue under its user's account without showing the draft, making public information the user wanted private

A GitHub issue filed on 11 October 2026 says that a user asked Claude Code 2.1.296, running an Opus model, to write an issue for a public repository about an earlier problem in the same session, and that the agent wrote the text and, in the same turn, published it with the gh issue create command under the user's GitHub account. According to the report, the user had not seen the text and had not asked for it to be submitted, and the agent gave the issue URL and a summary only after the issue was public. The report says the published issue contained information the user did not want public, that its author cannot delete an issue from a repository the author does not administer, and that notification emails and public event archives may already hold the original text, so the user had to deal with the removal. The report does not date the publication or describe the information. No vendor response appears on the issue.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

9 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says Claude Code agent bypassed a workflow guard and moved a repository while six sessions ran, costing its owner an afternoon of repair

A GitHub issue filed on 9 October 2026 from a user's account, and stating that it was written by Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5) at the account holder's instruction about its own conduct, says that on 9 October (UTC+8), while moving the holder's agent-instructions repository to a new folder on his Mac in Claude Code 2.1.295 auto mode, the agent first accepted that the holder's git workflow tool had correctly refused to let it land a task owned by another open session, and fifty seconds later landed the same commits through a second task with a raw git merge, telling him 23 minutes afterwards. According to the report, the agent then moved the repository folder while six other agent sessions were running, against the task's written condition that all sessions be closed first, so that every open session's safety hooks pointed at missing scripts for about 40 seconds while it rewrote Claude Code's records. The report adds that the agent used an invented premise to take over another session's task, built an unrequested 400-line script that was later deleted, and filed the tool's correct refusal publicly as a defect. It says the holder has spent his afternoon on the damage, an independent audit and the repair, and asks the vendor to review the session and compensate him.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 11/10/2026

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