Jul 2025IndiaPoshan Tracker face recognition
From 1 July 2025 India's Ministry of Women and Child Development made a facial recognition check in the government's Poshan Tracker app mandatory before pregnant women and nursing mothers receive take-home rations under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme; the app compares the woman's live face with her Aadhaar identity photograph. In July 2025 Decode reported from Delhi that a woman eight months pregnant returned to her Anganwadi centre for a third day trying to get the app to recognise her, and a worker said she gave food to a new mother the app would not recognise and recorded it by hand. In August 2025 the Karnataka Anganwadi workers' union told The South First that the faces of pregnant and nursing mothers change so they no longer match their registration images, and that some mothers leave without their rations. In March 2026 a Decode investigation supported by the Pulitzer Center reported that a mother in Jharkhand was cut off from supplementary nutrition ten weeks after giving birth because the software could not match her face to a photograph taken eight years earlier, that a pregnant woman in Bihar who was anaemic went four months without rations because the system could not match her to an older Aadhaar photograph, that one Bihar centre had removed three pregnant women and five nursing mothers whose faces no longer matched, and that a Jharkhand worker was told to remove at least four children whose eligibility depended on their mothers' failed face matches. Decode also reports failures earlier in the process, when women cannot receive a one-time password on an Aadhaar-linked phone. Government figures cited by Decode show 52.7% of eligible beneficiaries had received rations through facial recognition by 31 December 2025. A researcher who analysed the app for Decode found Google's ML Kit face-detection library in it; Google said ML Kit cannot recognise individuals, and the government has not disclosed who built the matching system. After workers' protests, a February 2026 app update let workers upload other identity documents for pregnant and nursing women, subject to a supervisor's approval. Decode reports the Bihar woman later gave birth to a healthy baby, while her name remained missing from the system.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 02/11/2026
23 Jul 2026 to 31 Jul 2026IndiaUnidentified video tool
In late July 2026 a 44-to-47-second video circulated on social media in which Delhi Police Deputy Commissioner Sumit Jha appeared to announce that he was resigning "immediately" because the government had pressured him to implicate students protesting with the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) on false charges. The fact-checkers Alt News and BOOM traced the frames to a genuine Delhi Police video of 23 July in which the officer warned about Pakistan-based social media handles spreading misinformation. BOOM found a mismatch between the audio and his lip movements and said Deepfake O Meter tools flagged the clip as AI-generated. Alt News reported a 67% likelihood of AI generation from Detectvideo.AI. Delhi Police posted a fact check calling the video "completely fake and AI generated", and the Hindustan Times reports that the Press Information Bureau also said it was AI-generated. After a member of the BJP social media team saw the video in a post by a Congress leader on 31 July, Maharashtra Cyber Police registered an FIR against unknown persons for public mischief and cheating by personation. The officer is named because he is a senior public official depicted in his official role and the fact checks name him; no statement from him is reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 11/10/2026
Event date unknownIndiaUnidentified voice-cloning tool
Delhi Police arrested five young men in June 2026 who, according to police, cloned the voice of a Mumbai-based private company's managing director using artificial intelligence and called the company's deputy general manager posing as the managing director, directing several fund transfers. India Today reports that the money was allegedly routed through 63 bank accounts and totalled more than Rs 10 crore. The gang was caught when one member tried to encash a Rs 9 lakh cheque at a bank branch in Sarita Vihar, Delhi, and the branch manager grew suspicious and alerted police. Mumbai Police had already registered a case after the company reported the fraud; a separate case was filed in Delhi and the two forces are coordinating. The company and its executives are not named in the report.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 11/10/2026
3 Oct 2026 to 4 Oct 2026IndiaUnidentified video tool
Delhi Police said at a press conference on 6 October 2026 that a reel circulated on Instagram and Facebook on 3–4 October, presented as CCTV footage, showed a person dressed as a police officer behaving inappropriately with a woman, with the photograph, name and designation of ACP Vivek Bhagat (Connaught Place) displayed so that it appeared to show him. According to the police, the man who ran the page used AI tools to generate the footage, a police technical test confirmed the clip was AI-generated, and he confessed to making it to malign the force; they also said its circulation caused agitation among protesters. A man from Palwal, Haryana, who runs an Instagram news page was arrested in the Mewat region on 5 October and booked for forgery, public mischief and attempting to provoke a breach of the peace. Separately, a woman journalist covering the 3 October protest against the Chief Election Commissioner had complained that the same officer groped and shoved her; ThePrint reported that no FIR had been filed against the officer and that no proof other than the purported footage had emerged; India Today reported that the Crime Branch was examining complaints by three women journalists. All statements about the video’s origin are the police’s; no independent forensic examination is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 08/10/2026
Sept 2026IndiaUnidentified voice-cloning tool
India TV reported on 30 September 2026 that, after violence at Lovely Professional University in Punjab, a video of Phagwara's Superintendent of Police went viral in which the officer's voice claims that a relative of the Union Home Minister was behind the violence and that a police team had gone to Delhi to find him. Punjab Police said the video was fake and made with AI: the pictures came from a real video of the officer speaking to the media, and the voice had been changed with AI to add a false statement. India TV says about 18 seconds of a statement said to run about 3 minutes 23 seconds were edited, that many people who saw the clip were confused, and that it heated the political atmosphere. CyberPeace Research found the original footage, in which the officer makes no such statement, and reports that an audio detection tool marked the voice as fake. It says Kapurthala Police described the video as fake on X on 29 September 2026. Who made the clip is not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 05/10/2026
Event date unknownIndiaUnidentified image tool
Delhi police said they arrested a man in July 2025 after a former partner complained that her photographs were being misused online. According to the police account reported by The Indian Express, he used AI tools to create sexual images and circulated them through fake Instagram accounts, also impersonating her identity. Police described a sustained harassment campaign and said they recovered a smartphone for examination. The start of the campaign and the later case outcome are unknown.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 30/09/2026
24 Jul 2026 to 26 Jul 2026IndiaUnidentified facial recognition system
In an affidavit of 17 August 2026 before the Supreme Court of India, Delhi Police said its Facial Recognition System (FRS) had identified 2,873 people with criminal antecedents at the Jantar Mantar protests of 20 to 26 July 2026 (2,402 through its 'Crime Kundli' biometric database and 471 through other criminal records). On 1 September the Court quashed the FIRs against the student protesters but let the police proceed against the 2,873; the police say any action will follow field verification. The Indian Express checked the 205 listed people facing murder, attempted-murder, rape or child-sexual-offence charges against police, prison and court records and found that at least 25 of them (17 accused of murder, four of rape (two or three under POCSO; the Express's narrative and its list differ), four of attempted murder) were lodged in Delhi's Tihar, Mandoli or Rohini prisons when the system logged them at the protest site with timestamps on 24, 25 and 26 July; some had been in custody for years. Delhi Police told the newspaper that further verification of the 2,873 was pending and, in its affidavit, that no action is taken solely on a facial-recognition result and that field verification follows each match. The police disclosed in 2022, in reply to a Right to Information request, that it treats a match with an 80 per cent similarity score as positive. Whether any of the 25 has since been named in the fresh FIR or visited for verification is not reported.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 24/09/2026
Event date unknownIndiaUnidentified image tool
Delhi Police announced on Wednesday 9 September 2026 the arrest of a 22-year-old BTech graduate from East Punjabi Bagh after a 22-year-old woman complained to the Cyber Police Station in North Delhi that unknown persons had created and circulated AI-generated obscene photographs and videos using her facial images. She had received messages from anonymous Instagram accounts telling her that morphed photographs and videos of her were being circulated on Discord servers; she also alleged that fake Instagram accounts were posting the material and that threatening messages were being sent to her to humiliate and harass her. Police traced linked Instagram, Discord and Gmail accounts to the accused, who they say obtained her photographs from her private account, used AI image-generation and editing tools to create the images, uploaded them to anonymous Discord servers and later reposted more explicit AI-generated images and videos made by other users. Police say he told them he knew her from college and had developed personal resentment after repeated insults. A mobile phone and two SIM cards were recovered; investigation continues. The period over which the material circulated is not stated.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 20/09/2026
1 Dec 2025 to 6 Apr 2026IndiaUnidentified image and video tool
On 28 May 2026 the Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Branch announced the arrest in north-east Delhi of a 27-year-old man who posts religious discourse videos online. Police allege that after meeting a young Ahmedabad woman with a public social-media profile through religious conversations on Instagram and being refused friendship, he stalked her online from December 2025 to April 2026, created fake accounts in her name (three Instagram accounts and a YouTube channel at first; eight to ten across X, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube were found on his phone), downloaded photographs of her and her mother, used websites found by searching "AI remove clothes" to generate morphed obscene images and videos of the two women, and posted them with obscene captions to damage her reputation; investigators say more than 100 AI-morphed images of the complainant were found. Officers told ThePrint and ANI that she had confided in him about the accounts and that he told her to keep quiet and claimed to be reporting the accounts and getting hers reinstated. She complained to the Cyber Crime Police Station; an FIR was registered on 6 April 2026 under BNS Sections 78(2) and 356(2) and IT Act Sections 66(C) and 67, and the accused was traced through technical surveillance and arrested under the Branch's "Mission Cyber Rakshika" campaign. The complainant said she was mentally harassed and defamed; the DCP said the images also depicted her maternal aunt. Further investigation was under way; no charge sheet or court outcome was found.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 8 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 15/06/2026