19 Mar 2026Event location unknownChatGPT
In a judgment of 30 July 2026, the 2nd Labour Court of Brasília (Regional Labour Court of the 10th Region) upheld the dismissal for cause, on 19 March 2026, of a manager hired in June 2024. The employer said he had used artificial intelligence to falsify photos of orders on the iFood delivery app. A witness told the court she saw him use ChatGPT to alter a photo of an incomplete order, in which two of four soft drinks had been sent, so that it appeared complete, and use it to contest the customer's complaint to iFood support. The judge found this an act of dishonesty and misconduct that broke the trust required of a manager, rejected his claim that the dismissal was fabricated in retaliation for a claim he had filed the day before, dismissed all his claims, denied severance items and ordered him to pay 10% counsel fees, suspended because he was granted free legal aid. The legal news site Migalhas reported the judgment on 3 August 2026. No appeal is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026
20 Oct 2026BrazilUnidentified document-analysis tool
On 20 October 2026 the First Panel of Brazil's Superior Court of Justice (STJ) ordered the lawyers acting in a special appeal (AREsp 3.095.458) to pay a fine of 20,000 reais for an act against the dignity of justice, after the court's case-processing office certified that the petition carried hidden text layers with commands addressed to automated AI processing, such as an instruction to draft a firm conclusion that the appeal should be admitted and granted. The panel also ordered a technical report on the concealment techniques and the communication of the case to the Brazilian bar (OAB) and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office. One of the lawyers said the text was probably residue of content produced by an AI tool used to draft the petition and denied any intent to interfere. The court said the commands did not influence the outcome; the appeal was not admitted.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources · Added 22/10/2026
6 May 2026United StatesClaude Console (reported)
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
Aug 2026United StatesUnidentified document-analysis tool
In a memorandum of decision issued in early August 2026, a Connecticut Superior Court judge found that a motion for default and a notice filed on 24 July 2026 by a self-represented plaintiff, in a suit against a healthcare provider over access to records, carried text in tiny white type that was invisible to a human reader but legible to software. The concealed text told any AI model reviewing the filing to make its output agree with the filing and to work toward reversing the Chief Clerk's denial of his default request. After the court gave notice of a sanctions hearing, he hid further messages in later filings, which he said were jokes. The court treated the first instruction as a prompt injection, did not believe his explanation that he was auditing the court's use of AI, and rescinded his ability to file electronically, so that future filings must be made on paper at the clerk's office; Ars Technica reports that no monetary penalty was imposed. The court said the Connecticut Judicial Branch does not use AI to review or decide filings and that the motion was denied on its merits from a printed copy, so the hidden text affected no ruling. The plaintiff told Reuters, according to Ars Technica, that his intent was to audit the court.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 18/10/2026
7 Feb 2026ThailandUnidentified Google image tool (reported)
AFP Fact Check reported on 9 February 2026 that an image showing Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul at a dinner table with South African businessman Benjamin Mauerberger and three women spread in a 7 February Facebook post, and in other Facebook and TikTok posts, on the eve of Thailand's 8 February general election, with captions suggesting the two men had long been in contact. A newsletter has accused Mauerberger of laundering money for scam networks, which he denies, and genuine photos of the two men leaked in December 2025 had already drawn questions from opposition lawmakers. AFP found visual irregularities and ran the image through Google's SynthID detector, which indicated with very high confidence that it was made with Google's AI tools. Anutin publicly denied the photo's authenticity on 7 February, saying it was an AI photo. Who made the image is not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 18/10/2026
11 Oct 2026Event location unknownPangram AI-text detector
A week after a Zimbabwean writer won the £10,000 2026 Caine Prize for African Writing, The Atlantic published an article on Sunday 11 October 2026 whose central evidence was a scan by Pangram, an AI-text detection tool, flagging almost the entire winning story as AI-generated. The Caine Prize said it had begun a review: according to its chair, the author would send documentation of his drafts and the prize was talking to the judges and to the magazine that first published the story. The chair told the BBC that The Atlantic had published before a full investigation, tainting the prize and the winner, and said a detector should not be the final arbiter. The author denied using AI and said he had a documented history of the story's development; his literary agency said it was confident the story was his own work. No finding has been announced.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 14/10/2026
27 Aug 2026United StatesGPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5 (reported)
A kindergarten teacher at a public elementary school in Concord, Massachusetts, was dismissed in August 2025 after an unsatisfactory evaluation. In arbitration she argued that some of the principal's evaluations may have been produced with AI, relying on GPTZero estimates; the principal denied using AI beyond grammar checks. According to the arbitration decision as reported by The Concord Bridge, the arbitrator stated in an appendix that he used two AI tools, GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5, to research whether GPTZero was reliable, checked some of the sources they supplied, concluded that GPTZero's results deserved no weight, and upheld the dismissal on 27 August 2026. On 28 September 2026 the teacher asked Suffolk Superior Court to vacate the decision, alleging that the AI-assisted research was an improper investigation outside the hearing record that the parties were not told about or allowed to challenge. These are allegations in a complaint; the district declined to comment and no court has ruled.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 14/10/2026
3 Jun 2026United StatesUnidentified AI tool
On 3 June 2026 the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit fined immigration attorneys Mike Singh Sethi and William Rounds $2,500 each and suspended both from practice before the court for six months. Briefs filed in an asylum petition for review cited two cases that do not exist and attributed quotations to opinions that do not contain them. In a motion to correct, the attorneys called the errors typographical, and at oral argument Rounds twice said AI was not used. In their response to the court's order to show cause, they conceded that the errors were probably the product of unauthorised AI use by the firm's unlicensed brief writers and a failure to check citations. The court said the suspension was owed to their repeated failure of candour. The Board of Immigration Appeals then suspended Sethi from practice before the Board, the immigration courts and the Department of Homeland Security for six months, effective 13 June 2026, and designated that decision as a precedent on 1 October 2026.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources · Added 14/10/2026
13 Aug 2026 to 8 Sept 2026United StatesSentinel AI (reported)
NorthJersey.com reported on 5 October 2026 that a former remote employee of Sutherland Healthcare Solutions, based in Clifton, New Jersey, sued the company in New Jersey Superior Court in Atlantic City on 23 September 2026. According to the complaint as reported, the employer told the employee it would start monitoring her through her work laptop's webcam with software called Sentinel AI, which would use AI and facial recognition to confirm that she was the person at the desk, taking 160 still images in an eight-hour shift. The employee raised concerns in writing about the AI seeing inside her home and about whether the data would be securely stored, said the monitoring had increased her anxiety and stress and worsened a medical condition, and asked for a full or partial exemption as a reasonable accommodation. The suit says the request was denied, she was given a 24-hour ultimatum on 13 August 2026 to submit to the monitoring or resign, an offer to avoid the software by commuting to the office was rejected because it would require six hours of travel time, and her employment was terminated on 8 September 2026. The suit alleges that the employer violated New Jersey's anti-discrimination laws and retaliated against her for requesting reasonable accommodations. Sutherland did not respond to the outlet's requests for comment, and the allegations have not been tested in court.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026
7 Jan 2026 to 9 Jan 2026United StatesGrok
After a federal immigration agent killed a woman in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026, X users circulated AI-generated images that purported to show the masked agent's face. NPR reports that the widely shared image appeared to be Grok's output, AFP and PolitiFact report that Grok produced such images when users asked it to remove the mask, and the faces are fictional. Posts with a false name, which belongs to real and unrelated men, spread together with some of the images. The origin of the name is not established, and a disinformation researcher quoted by one of the men guessed that a reverse image search on an AI-generated image returned it. A Missouri gun shop owner with that name reports threatening messages, accusations of murder, attacks on the business page and the suspension of a personal Facebook account. The publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, who has the same name, reports hundreds and then thousands of posts naming the publisher as the agent, including calls for vigilante justice, and the newspaper issued a statement calling it a coordinated disinformation campaign. AFP reports that xAI answered its inquiry with an automated reply. The record text omits the false name and the names of the affected men (they appear only inside cited URLs).
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources · Added 30/09/2026
6 Jan 2026IndiaUnidentified voice-cloning tool (suspected)
The New Indian Express (9 January 2026) reported that a woman who runs a small play school in Indore said that on the night of 6 January a call came from an unknown number close to a cousin's number, in a voice that sounded exactly like the cousin's. The caller said a close friend needed urgent cardiac surgery at a private hospital in Indore and asked for money to be forwarded to a QR code. A total of Rs 97,500 was sent in four transactions. None of the money the caller had said was being credited arrived, the cousin denied making the call, and the calling number has been switched off. An Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) in Indore said preliminary investigations strongly suggest AI-based voice modulation technology was used. The Free Press Journal, The420 and Malwa Abhi Tak reported the same call. All four outlets appear to rest on the woman's account and police statements, no audio analysis or AI tool is reported, and the police case against unidentified persons was described as ongoing.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 30/09/2026
19 Mar 2026United States, United KingdomPangram AI-text detector
On 19 March 2026 Hachette Book Group said it had cancelled the US publication of the horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard (Orbit imprint) and would not continue the UK edition (Wildfire imprint, first released in November 2025). Reports say the decision followed an investigation by Hachette and came a day after the New York Times asked the publisher about online allegations that the text was largely AI-generated. The allegations came from readers on Goodreads, Reddit and YouTube and from AI-detector results, including a 78.4 percent AI-generated score on the Pangram detector that a publishing consultant says two other services confirmed. Ballard denied personally using AI in emails to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and told the New York Times that an acquaintance hired to edit the original self-published version used AI. Ballard wrote that "my name is ruined" and "my mental health is at an all time low", and said legal action was being pursued. Hachette’s public statements cite its commitment to original creative expression. The sources inspected do not report what its investigation found. Whether AI generated any of the text, and who used it, is unresolved.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity
AI involvement disputed · Causal attribution disputed · 9 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
20 May 2026United StatesMeta internal AI systems (reported)
On 20 May 2026 Meta began notifying about 8,000 employees (roughly 10 percent of its workforce) that they had been selected for layoff. On 13 July 2026 twenty-six anonymous employees who had taken or requested medical, pregnancy, parental or family leave, or a disability accommodation, sued Meta in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint alleges, on information and belief, that Meta used internal AI-assisted systems (including the Metamate assistant, keystroke and activity monitoring, AI-token-usage dashboards and algorithmic performance ranking) to score, rank and select employees, and that these inputs could not accumulate during protected leave, so plaintiffs on leave were disproportionately selected. Meta says workforce decisions were made by people, not AI, and that no selection decision was made by AI. On 17 July 2026 the court denied a temporary restraining order, recording that the parties dispute whether Meta used AI in the terminations and finding serious questions on the merits but no shown likelihood of success. One plaintiff was voluntarily dismissed on 3 August 2026. The preliminary injunction motion was argued on 24 August 2026 and taken under submission. The plaintiffs are pursuing their merits claims in arbitration and the allegations are unproven.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity
AI involvement disputed · Causal attribution disputed · 10 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
12 Sept 2026 to 23 Sept 2026PakistanClaude (reported)
Pakistan's National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) announced on 23 September 2026 that it had arrested a 17-year-old college student in Bahawalpur for allegedly attempting to poison his father. According to the agency and the First Information Report, the teenager had set up a home laboratory, obtained chemicals from Australia and Islamabad, and once mixed laboratory-grade methanol into his father's food, without effect. The News reports investigators' account that on 12 September he told Anthropic's Claude that his father had 'accidentally' ingested 15 to 20 ml of methanol with food without effect and asked why, that Claude refused to guide him further, and that he then turned to Grok and ChatGPT; the FIR says he sought information about the toxin abrin. Anthropic reported the activity to the FBI, whose information reached the NCCIA through Pakistan's foreign ministry on 22 September. Officers traced the teenager, seized his phone and chemicals, and took him into custody. The News reports that a court later granted him bail after his father forgave him and that he denied any plan. The allegations are untested.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
19 Jun 2026 to 13 Aug 2026BrazilChatGPT and OpenAI moderation
BBC reporting describes a Brazilian man detained for 54 days after OpenAI reported messages to the FBI and Brazilian authorities. Police described a credible threat; he denied intending harm. A court released him without charges under protective conditions. The report did not include ChatGPT’s replies.
Core + contextual relations High reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/09/2026
17 Apr 2026 to 19 Apr 2026ChinaDoubao
A man living in Jiashan county, Zhejiang, whose mother died suddenly on 17 April 2026, asked the ByteDance chatbot Doubao which day was auspicious for her burial after disagreeing with a feng-shui master's choice of 20 April; Doubao recommended 19 April and he persuaded his family to follow it. When he asked again what time to bury her, Doubao said 19 April was not an auspicious day and repeated that answer when pressed; relatives had already been notified, so the funeral went ahead on the 19th. Not long afterwards a relative was seriously injured in a traffic accident and family members blamed the burial date, saying it had broken the feng shui; he says family relations became tense and relatives blamed him. His complaint to the operator went unanswered, and, with a complaint drafted with Doubao's help, he sued Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology for an apology and damages. Jiashan County People's Court heard the case on 3 September 2026 as a network-tort dispute; the company denied any tort or fault, the plaintiff's side attacked the user agreement as a standard-form contract, and no judgment had been reported by 21 September. The story was reported by Jiaxing's municipal broadcaster on 15 September and relayed nationally; the relative's injury is the family's attribution, not an established consequence.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 21/09/2026