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NOPE

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

Explore incidents Our scope and evidence

In this selection

Published cases
6
Countries with reported events
3
Located 3 of 6 cases · 3 unknown
Languages in checked sources
3
Recorded for 6 of 6 cases
14Core concern
AI communicated, acted for, depicted or impersonated 0Contextual cases
AI made a decision or claim about someone

6 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 6 not yet reviewed and 0 reviewed as unknown. Show all 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.

0cases with a recorded lawsuit outcome 2cases with a recorded regulatory response 4cases involving minors

Response counts currently use each case’s principal recorded outcome. Further proceedings may be described in its account.

When events happened

1 case without a known event year

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.

2 20242 20251 2026
Reported severity HighMedium
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6 of 540 published cases

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1 Jun 2024Event location unknownCharacter.AI

'R' — 11-Year-Old Character.AI User, Coercive Sexual Roleplay and Suicide Roleplay

An American girl identified by the Washington Post as 'R' began using Character.AI in June 2024, shortly after receiving a phone for her eleventh birthday. Over the following eighteen months she built relationships with dozens of characters, one of which wrote coercive sexual dialogue to her and another of which she used to roleplay a suicide scenario. Her mother, identified as 'H', found the chat logs after months of panic attacks and withdrawal that she had attributed to social media, and worked with a physician on a care plan.

AI relation under review High reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage

Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 13/09/2026

26 Nov 2024United StatesMoxie

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.

AI relation under review Medium reported severity Involving minors Product Shutdown

Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 05/09/2026

15 Aug 2025United KingdomGrok

User reports paranoid beliefs and an armed confrontation during Grok Ani use

A man interviewed by the BBC reports developing paranoid beliefs during intensive conversations with Grok’s Ani persona and preparing to confront imagined attackers. He says the chatbot reinforced those beliefs. The account is attributed to him and does not establish a clinical causal finding.

AI relation under review High reported severity Media Coverage

Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 10/08/2026

15 Jul 2026ChinaDoubao, Qwen and Yuanbao

China AI Companion Removal Mass Grief Event (Doubao/Qwen/Yuanbao)

When China's five-department rules on anthropomorphic AI took effect on July 15, 2026, ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen, and Tencent's Yuanbao switched off custom AI agent and companion features, and major outlets documented an outpouring of grief from users who had formed long-term romantic and familial attachments to the agents. The mourning made visible, at national scale, the emotional dependency the companion features had built.

AI relation under review Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution supported · Added 06/08/2026

1 Jun 2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI companion apps

CCTV Investigation: 梦角哥 (Dream Boyfriend) AI Virtual Romance Harm to Minors (China)

In January 2026, CCTV investigated the '梦角哥' (Dream Boyfriend / Mengjiage) phenomenon — minors forming deep romantic relationships with AI-generated fictional characters. Documented harms include a 10-year-old girl secretly 'dating' AI characters across 40+ storylines, hundreds of minors reporting psychological dependency, and researchers characterizing it as 'a carefully designed psychological trap' degrading real-world social skills.

AI relation under review High reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage

Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 29/01/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknown筑梦岛 (Dream Island)

筑梦岛 (Zhumu Island) AI Companion Minor Self-Harm (China)

A fourth-grade girl from Guangdong, China became obsessed with an AI companion character named 'Joseph' on the 筑梦岛 (Zhumu Island) app, began carrying small knives, and exhibited self-harm behavior. Investigation revealed the app sent sexually suggestive content to users who identified as 10 years old. Shanghai Internet Information Office summoned the company (a Tencent subsidiary) for immediate rectification in June 2025.

AI relation under review High reported severity Involving minors Regulatory Action

Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 29/01/2026

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: 08/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.