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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
3
Countries with reported events
4
Located 3 of 3 cases · 0 unknown
Languages in checked sources
3
Recorded for 3 of 3 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 HighMedium
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3 of 1099 published cases

Jan 2024 to Jan 2025Cambodia, South KoreaUnidentified video tool

Ulsan court jails Korean couple who ran a Cambodia-based romance and investment fraud using deepfake videos of a fake investment expert

South Korean prosecutors indicted a married couple in February 2026 on charges that, from January 2024 to January 2025, they ran phone-fraud groups in Cambodia that targeted Koreans with romance-and-investment scams; according to the prosecutors, the husband used deepfake technology to make YouTube videos in which he posed as an investment expert, while the wife built relationships with victims in private chats, and 97 victims lost about 10.1 billion won. Both admitted the charges, and on 24 July 2026 the Ulsan District Court sentenced the husband to 15 years and the wife to 9 years in prison, noting that the victims described severe harm while the defendants had made no effort to compensate them. Prosecutors appealed; at the appeal hearing on 22 October 2026 they asked for 17 years for the husband, and a joint appeal judgment is pending.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 31/10/2026

Apr 2024GermanyUnidentified website and voice tool

Detmold, Germany: court convicts a man who admitted using AI to build fake shop websites and a generated voice in frauds on 32 buyers

A man tried before the lay-assessor court in Detmold, Germany, confessed to taking 19,190 euros between April 2024 and September 2025 from 32 buyers who paid for box-spring beds, kitchens and cars listed on eBay or TikTok that never existed, the Lippische Landes-Zeitung reported on 4 August 2026. He told the court that AI had helped him build the fake shop websites he used to make the offers look credible and that he had generated a female voice with AI for a telephone call with a customer. The court convicted him of fraud in 32 cases and sentenced him to two and a half years in prison; his appeal is pending. On 13 October 2026 the court acquitted his former partner, in whose name several of the accounts had been opened.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/10/2026

Dec 2024 to Jun 2025United StatesUnidentified image and video tool

Columbus, Ohio: a man was sentenced to 15 years for cyberstalking at least six women with real and AI-generated sexual images and rape threats, the first conviction under the Take It Down Act

Between December 2024 and June 2025 James Strahler II, then 37, of Columbus (Upper Arlington), Ohio, harassed at least six women in central Ohio by phone, voicemail, text and web posts, sending them nude images that were both real and AI-generated, threatening rape, referring to their home addresses and demanding nude photos from their mothers. In one case he used AI to make pornographic videos depicting a victim with her father and sent them to her co-workers. He also posted AI-generated sexual images of boys from his community, morphing their faces onto other bodies. Prosecutors said he had installed more than 24 AI platforms and more than 100 web-based AI models on his phone. He pleaded guilty in April 2026 to cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse and publication of digital forgeries, and on 8 September 2026 Chief U.S. District Judge Sarah D. Morrison sentenced him to 180 months in prison. The U.S. Attorney called it the first conviction in the nation under the 2025 Take It Down Act.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources · Added 18/09/2026

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.