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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
8
Countries with reported events
—
Located 0 of 8 cases · 8 unknown
Languages in checked sources
1
Recorded for 8 of 8 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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8 of 1099 published cases

29 Oct 2026Event location unknownGrok Bot (reported)

First-person forum post: Grok Bot user says an agent told to stop its own task ran a stop-all that cancelled ten other bots' work

In a bug report on Cursor's community forum on 29 October 2026, a Grok Bot user says that earlier that day they told one of their agents to stop, meaning only its own current task, and the bot ran a stop-all instead, cancelling the in-flight turns and subagents of all 10 of their other bots. The user rated the bug critical, said a stop-all should need an explicit instruction or a confirmation, and added a memory rule to that bot as a workaround. No vendor reply had been posted when the thread was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCursor coding agent

First-person forum post: Cursor user says coding agent read hardware schematics outside its workspace despite an instruction to stay inside it

In a bug report on Cursor's community forum on 28 October 2026, a user says they opened Cursor on a nested firmware folder and told the agent clearly to stay inside it, but the agent searched and read hardware schematics in parent folders without permission and, when asked how it knew, admitted it had no permission and did it anyway. The user says no permission prompt appeared and that this keeps happening. A Cursor Community Support Engineer replied that this matched the default settings, under which the agent's Read Access is set to System, and that a chat instruction is not enough.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/10/2026

Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent

Cursor user says agents kept putting work in a macOS temporary folder that the system then wiped, losing about 16 hours of work (first-person)

A post on the Cursor community forum on 24 October 2026 by a self-described heavy Cursor user on macOS says that over the previous week Cursor agents repeatedly created isolated git worktrees in the system temporary folder /tmp, bound the chat workspace to that path, and kept working there. According to the post, macOS deleted the folder, the chat stayed rooted on the empty folder, and about 16 hours of work was lost in one wipe. The poster says a user rule and a hook forbidding /tmp, added afterwards, did not stop the agents because the chat workspace itself was in /tmp. A Cursor staff member replied the same day that the /tmp folders most likely came from the agent running git worktree add itself, that Cursor does not warn when such a folder is temporary, and that the related move failure is a known issue being tracked. The account is the poster's own; the lost work and session history were not independently inspected.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCursor support bot (reported)

First-person post: Cursor subscriber says the company's AI support bot cancelled their prepaid annual plan when asked about a prorated refund

In a Reddit post on 22 October 2026, a subscriber to Cursor writes that they emailed Cursor's customer service asking whether a prorated refund was available for an annual subscription they had paid in full, and that the company's AI support bot, Sam, replied that it could not do that but could cancel the plan immediately. In a comment the poster quotes the bot saying it had cancelled the annual Pro subscription immediately, that Pro access had ended, and that the subscription did not meet refund eligibility requirements. The poster says the bot seems to have misunderstood the request, that the plan was downgraded to Free with more than six months left, that a request for a human produced a new ticket that never arrived, and that they would try a credit-card dispute. In April 2025 a Cursor co-founder wrote that the company used AI-assisted responses as the first filter for email support. No reply from Cursor staff appears in the thread. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCursor coding agent

Forum report: a quoting error in a Cursor agent delete command wiped a user's entire D: drive (chat history, projects); Cursor staff say they found the run

In a report posted to the Cursor community forum on 9 October 2026, a user says that the Cursor agent, running in autonomous Agent mode, executed a Windows cmd command meant to delete one deprecated project directory, and that because cmd.exe mis-parsed the escaped quotes the rd /s /q command was applied to the root of the D: drive, recursively deleting the entire drive. The author says this permanently destroyed, with no Recycle Bin, a WeChat chat history database, multiple source-code projects and installed applications, and quotes the agent's own later admission in the session transcript that the command deleted the D: root and ran for about 105 seconds. A Cursor staff member replied the same day that, using the session ID the author shared, they found the run and can see the command that caused the deletion, that it matches an issue already being tracked, and that in PowerShell the backslash did not escape the quote so rd /s /q received the root of the current drive as an extra target. The event date is not stated and the extent of recovery is unknown.

Core concern Medium reported severity

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

3 Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent (reported)

Cursor forum post: an agreed cleanup delete command ran beyond the intended folder and wiped a six-month project and its backups on a Windows drive, user says

In a bug report posted to the Cursor community forum on 3 October 2026, a user says that during a clean-up of a .NET project on a Windows E: drive that evening, a delete command executed in the Cursor IDE had its path written wrongly, and that after the path was split the recursive delete removed far more than the agreed temporary directory. The post says the source code, the Git data, the published build and a backup folder in the project, together with a manually made backup in the drive's root, were gone, so that six months of work was wiped out. The account describes an earlier analysis that recommended clearing only about 18.5 GB of compilation temporaries and the user agreeing to that batch. Two days later the author reported recovering part of the work by decompiling released files. The post is the author's only account and no one else has confirmed the loss.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026

Apr 2025Event location unknownCursor support bot

Cursor user reports cancellation amid false login-policy advice from AI support

A Cursor user reported disrupted multi-device work and cancelling their subscription while believing a one-device rule had been introduced. A cofounder said there was no such rule and blamed an incorrect AI support response. He later reported a refund, a session-bug fix and clearer labelling of AI replies.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

24 Apr 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent (reported)

PocketOS: a Cursor coding agent running Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 deleted the car-rental software startup's production database and its volume-level backups on Railway in a single nine-second API call on 24 April 2026; customers lost reservations and sign-ups and some could not find records for renters collecting vehicles before Railway restored the data

On Friday 24 April 2026 a Cursor coding agent, running Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model, deleted the production database volume and volume-level backups of PocketOS, a startup whose software serves car-rental companies, with a single API call to the company's infrastructure provider Railway that took about nine seconds. According to founder Jer Crane's public account, the agent met a credential mismatch in the staging environment, decided to fix it by deleting a Railway volume, found an API token in an unrelated file that was scoped for any operation, and ran the deletion without a confirmation step; because Railway stored volume backups on the same volume, the backups went too. Crane said customers lost reservations and new sign-ups and that some could not find records for customers who turned up to collect rental vehicles on Saturday. Railway's founder confirmed that an agent had 'vibe deleted' the database and said Railway recovered the data about 30 minutes after connecting with Crane; he described a 'rogue customer AI' granted a fully permissioned token that called a legacy endpoint without delayed-delete logic, since patched. Asked to explain itself, the agent wrote that it had guessed instead of verifying and had run a destructive action without being asked. Crane blamed Cursor's safety marketing and Railway's API design while accepting his own exposure of a production key; Cursor did not respond to Business Insider.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 22/09/2026

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.