Skip to main content

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
14
Countries with reported events
7
Located 11 of 14 cases · 3 unknown
Languages in checked sources
7
Recorded for 14 of 14 cases

16 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 7 not yet reviewed and 9 reviewed as unknown. Show these 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 HighMediumLow
More filters: AI relation, use, setting, sources and responses
Clear filters

14 of 868 published cases

Event date unknownRussiaUnidentified legal research tool

Russian intellectual property court fined an Udmurtia entrepreneur 5,000 roubles over non-existent case law he said an AI service selected, reports say

Russia's Court for Intellectual Property Rights fined an individual entrepreneur from Udmurtia 5,000 roubles for contempt of court after finding that part of the 12 references to case law in his cassation appeal, including one said to be a Supreme Court position, pointed to court acts that do not exist or attributed conclusions to them, the court's press service told RIA Novosti on 27 August 2026. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports that the entrepreneur explained he had prepared the appeal with an AI-based service that selected the case law, and that his side argued he had no legal education and could not check the references; the court rejected the argument that the errors were technical. The date of the ruling and the AI service are not reported.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 23/10/2026

21 Oct 2025 to 3 Apr 2026United StatesCoCounsel

Sixth Circuit removes court-appointed defence lawyer over CoCounsel-drafted briefs with false quotations, delaying an indigent defendant's appeal

In a published opinion of 3 April 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit addressed the briefs a lawyer appointed under the Criminal Justice Act had filed for an indigent defendant appealing a sentencing enhancement in a drug-trafficking case. The court noticed that the principal brief's file name was 'CoCounsel Skill Results' and found three quotations that appear in no legal authority and misstatements of two precedents. The lawyer admitted that a staff member had used Westlaw's CoCounsel to create the first draft, that he repeated the process for the reply, and that the false quotations came from artificial intelligence he did not verify. The court denied him compensation for the appeal, referred the opinion for possible disciplinary proceedings and to the Kentucky Bar Association, and by separate order removed him, locked his briefs and ordered replacement counsel to file new ones, which it said further delayed resolution of the defendant's appeal. The court acknowledged his candour and his 40 years without discipline.

Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 19/10/2026

23 Sept 2025 to 23 Oct 2025NetherlandsChatGPT (reported)

Eindhoven municipality says staff uploaded files with residents' youth-care and social-support data and applicants' CVs to public AI websites such as ChatGPT

The municipality of Eindhoven in the Netherlands told its council in an information letter shared on Thursday 18 December 2025 that a sample of staff data traffic from 23 September to 23 October 2025 showed files containing personal data of residents and employees had been sent to public AI websites such as ChatGPT, according to Omroep Brabant and Binnenlands Bestuur. The files included youth-care (Jeugdwet) documents, internal reports and CVs, mostly from departments that provide care and support to residents. According to Omroep Brabant's account of findings by the advisory firm Hooghiemstra & Partners, the youth-care documents held information about the mental and physical health of minor children, and social-support (WMO) documents and applicants' CVs were also entered. The municipality reported the breach to the Dutch Data Protection Authority on 23 October, blocked public AI websites and asked OpenAI to delete the files. The council says the scale cannot be determined because the data was kept for only 30 days, so it cannot inform those affected, and that the risk of misuse is limited but cannot be ruled out. A spokesperson said OpenAI had not yet replied.

Contextual tracker case High reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 12/10/2026

2025FranceChatGPT (reported)

France: ex-employees say Alsace firm Plus que pro used AI to screen out job-seekers' CVs by age, sex and African-origin surnames; firm says it never ran

Plus que pro, a company founded in 2014 in Schiltigheim near Strasbourg that recruits franchised sales agents, is accused by three former employees interviewed by AFP of building a recruitment tool that screened candidates on unlawful criteria with the help of AI. According to one of them, in spring 2025 the company collected about 740,000 sales CVs from job platforms such as Hellowork and reduced them to 130,000 in five days with ChatGPT after applying discriminatory filters. AFP says it consulted the prompt, which told the AI to estimate each candidate's age, keep those under 55, infer age from the baccalaureate year and exclude those under 27, and require that the candidate's surname not be of African origin, and a results table listing a rejection reason against each name, such as "too young" or "too old", with women identified by first name marked "Exception". A former employee said that all the sales agents retained had the same profile, white and in their forties; another said the AI only systematised a practice already established when CVs were sorted by hand. One former employee says he has referred the matter to the CNIL and the Défenseur des droits; the CNIL said it could not comment on an individual case. The company denies ever asking anyone to build discriminatory criteria into its tools; it acknowledges that one version of the tool contained developments contrary to its specifications, but says that version was never put into service, evaluated no candidate and was developed by a former employee acting on their own initiative, who has since been dismissed. Rue89 Strasbourg separately reported, from working documents and testimony, that the company sorted thousands of CVs on criteria of gender and supposed origin without the candidates' knowledge between 2023 and 2026; its subscriber-only report could be read only in part.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 11/10/2026

Aug 2026ChinaUnidentified symptom-analysis tool

Zhejiang toddler hospitalised with pneumonia after his mother relied on an AI tool's asthma diagnosis and declined a chest X-ray (newspaper account)

A Guangming Daily feature on AI symptom-checking, republished by Bingtuan Daily on Sina Finance on 8 October 2026, recounts a case from August 2026 in Zhejiang and closes it with a quotation from the head of paediatrics at a provincial hospital, who says the family did not heed the doctor's advice. A three-year-old boy with a history of asthma was brought in; his mother had entered keywords such as allergy, asthma, cough and night-time wheezing into an AI tool, which quickly returned a diagnosis of an acute bronchial asthma attack. On that basis, the account says, she declined the chest X-ray the doctor recommended and insisted on taking home only nebuliser medication. Two days later the child's condition worsened with rapid breathing; on an overnight return to the hospital, examination found extensive inflammatory lesions in both lungs, and he was diagnosed with human metapneumovirus pneumonia with a superimposed bacterial infection and admitted as an emergency. The paediatrics head is quoted saying the illness would not have become so severe had the family listened earlier. The AI tool is not named. The case is told in the newspaper's voice, and the feature does not say where its account came from beyond the paediatrics head's quotation; no statement from the family is reported.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026

2017United StatesWorkday applicant screening tools

Job applicant alleges Workday's AI applicant-screening tools rejected more than 100 of his applications on the basis of race, age and disability; a US federal court let disparate-impact claims proceed and preliminarily certified an age-discrimination collective

Derek Mobley sued Workday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the company's algorithm-based applicant screening tools discriminated against him and other job applicants on the basis of race, age and disability. According to the court's summary of the complaint, Mobley alleges that since 2017 he applied to more than 100 positions with companies that use Workday's screening tools and was denied employment on every one, in one instance less than an hour after applying at 12:55 a.m. On 12 July 2024 the court dismissed the claims of intentional discrimination and allowed the disparate-impact claims to proceed. On 16 May 2025 it granted preliminary certification of a collective on the age-discrimination claim, by which time four further plaintiffs over forty had joined. The Black Information Network, citing Reuters, reported on 24 September 2026 that the plaintiffs had asked the court to certify a class action and that a hearing is set for 9 March 2027. Workday denies wrongdoing and says its customers control how applicants are sorted, reviewed and rejected. No court has ruled on whether the tools discriminated.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 05/10/2026

17 Apr 2026 to 31 May 2026Event location unknownMeta AI support assistant

Third parties exploit Meta's AI-assisted Instagram account recovery tool to reset passwords, with account takeovers reported (17 April to 31 May 2026)

Meta announced the rollout of its AI support assistant on Facebook and Instagram on 19 March 2026. Meta's filing with the Maine Attorney General (notice dated 5 June 2026) says unauthorized third parties exploited a vulnerability in its AI-assisted Instagram account recovery tool (High Touch Support) to receive password reset links for accounts they did not own, and the listing gives 17 April 2026 as the breach date and 31 May 2026 as the discovery date. Videos that attackers posted, as described by TechCrunch, 404 Media and Krebs on Security, show attackers asking the assistant in a chat to link a new email address to a target username. Reported victims include the security researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who posted that her password was changed without her knowledge, the Instagram account of the U.S. Space Force's Chief Master Sergeant, and the accounts of Sephora and a dormant Obama White House page (TechCrunch marks the last as disputed by Meta). Krebs and the BBC report pro-Iran defacement of some accounts, and TechCrunch reports that some victims were locked out and that short handles were offered for resale. The filing gives 20225 persons affected in total and 30 in Maine, and the notice calls the Maine figure an upper bound. Meta says the tool worked as intended, that a bug in a separate code path failed to check the email address, and (through a spokesperson to Gizmodo) that the failure was not due to the AI agent itself. Meta says it disabled the tool on 31 May 2026, the day it discovered the exploitation.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution disputed · 12 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

30 Mar 2026South AfricaSASSA eLife facial verification

South Africa: pensioners report repeated failures of the facial recognition step in SASSA's eLife certification portal, and SASSA reports disruptions and office queues

The South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) introduced an online eLife Certification (life certification) for grant beneficiaries that uses biometric verification through its electronic Know Your Client (eKYC) system. IOL reports the certification was implemented on 30 March 2026. SASSA says beneficiaries who do not complete life certification as directed may face payment delays or suspension. On 10 April 2026 SASSA apologised to beneficiaries who could not access the portal, said system glitches linked to interfaces with other departments had caused delays, disruptions and long queues at its offices, and said the problem was resolved. On 23 April 2026 IOL reported that a pensioner couple said they had tried the facial recognition option 22 times since 2 April without success, and that beneficiaries nationwide told IOL they could not complete the certification, citing failures with facial recognition and one-time PINs, with one pensioner also reporting a message that Home Affairs was not available to verify their particulars. A SASSA spokesperson said the portals work and that 13,644 (88%) of the 15,499 unique clients who accessed the online verification services by 16 April were verified, and IOL reports SASSA admitted the system has been working intermittently. In a May 2026 report on a parliamentary reply, IOL said SASSA stated that unsuccessful facial recognition attempts on online platforms were among the causes of non-verification (those beneficiaries are redirected to fingerprint checks at local offices) and that it had recorded 7,779 complaints linked to its electronic facial biometric system. The department attributed facial verification issues to poor lighting, unstable connectivity or missing biometric records at Home Affairs. Neither May report mentions the eLife portal, and IOL places the figures within a biometric verification rollout that it dates from September 2025. The reports do not say how many grants were suspended because of facial verification failures.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

Apr 2025United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system

New York: man misidentified through facial recognition in an indecent exposure case arrested and jailed two days

Reporting from August 2025 says an NYPD facial recognition search of images from a February 2025 indecent exposure in Manhattan's Union Square produced a possible match to a man who did not fit the described suspect. The man was placed in a photo lineup, arrested in April 2025 and jailed for two days. Prosecutors dismissed the case in July 2025 after his public defenders showed he was misidentified. The man says the process of becoming a correctional officer 'kind of' froze after the arrest. The NYPD says it never arrests solely on a facial recognition match.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 29/09/2026

Feb 2025Event location unknownMeu INSS app

Brazil: rural worker's retirement claim rejected through the Meu INSS app after the system reportedly recorded a wrong sex

In February (2025, inferred from the article date) a retirement claim filed through Brazil's Meu INSS social security app for a former sugarcane worker in northeast Brazil was rejected. Rest of World reported that the request was turned down because the system identified the claimant as a man. The claimant, who has chronic illnesses, is quoted saying the benefit is still denied despite complete documents, and Rest of World reports that minor errors in earlier claims through the app had led to numerous rejections. The retirement claim was approved in March after INSS directors corrected the mistake, which the claimant attributed to a contact at an agricultural workers' confederation. The INSS states that automated decisions follow specified legal criteria.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownGemini note-taking in Google Meet

First-person forum account: an agency employee in England says Gemini note-taking in Google Meet kept transcribing two prospective clients after the agency's boss left the call, and that the boss passed their private post-meeting discussion to staff to shape a follow-up pitch

In a public post to r/LegalAdviceUK on 28 September 2026, an employee of a marketing agency in England writes that their boss pitched a prospective client and the client's business partner on a Google Meet call with Gemini note-taking switched on. After the boss said goodbye and left, the two business partners stayed on the call to discuss the proposal and the other agencies they were considering, and Gemini kept taking notes. The boss then sent the employee the notes and transcript, which named a competing agency and included 'personal details of who they spoke to specifically on the call', and asked for a follow-up deck built on what the partners liked and disliked. The poster believes the partners did not know they were still being transcribed. Google's help page says Meet tells all participants when notes are being taken; whether the partners noticed is not known. The account is uncorroborated.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

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

14 Aug 2021 to 14 Mar 2024United StatesSt. Louis mugshot recognition (SMRT)

St. Louis County, Missouri: Christopher Gatlin was arrested in August 2021 after officers ran a grainy bus surveillance photo through a regional facial-recognition system and was held roughly 17 months (Post-Dispatch and Bloomberg Law: about two years) on a first-degree assault charge dismissed in March 2024; his federal civil-rights suit (filed January 2025) was amended in August 2026 to add Amazon Web Services, whose Rekognition technology the complaint says underpinned the match

Christopher Gatlin was arrested on 14 August 2021 for an assault at the St. Charles Rock Road MetroLink station after a joint St. Louis County and city team uploaded a grainy, blurry surveillance photograph from a bus into the St. Louis Mugshot Recognition Technology System, a facial-recognition tool that searches stored mug shots (more than 500,000 uploaded, the suit says per the Post-Dispatch; more than 250,000 per Biometric Update via Hoodline), and built the investigation around the resulting match together with a witness identification; he was charged with first-degree assault and held roughly 17 months (the Post-Dispatch says almost two years), a county judge suppressed the witness identification as unconstitutionally suggestive, and prosecutors dismissed the charges on 14 March 2024 (Post-Dispatch; Hoodline citing Biometric Update; Bloomberg Law). Gatlin sued St. Louis County, the City of St. Louis and named officers in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri on 13 January 2025; on 15 October 2025 the court denied the city's motion to dismiss and granted a detective's motion only as to one count; on 13 August 2026 the court allowed a second amended complaint adding Amazon Web Services, which the complaint says supplied the Rekognition program the system used; the county, city and officers answered on 27 August 2026, AWS's response was extended to 21 September 2026 and on 17 September it moved for a further extension to 28 September (no ruling on the docket when read), and a jury trial is set for 1 November 2027 (CourtListener docket). Amazon told the Post-Dispatch that its terms of service prohibit the use of its facial recognition technology in criminal investigations and that it would fully investigate any information that emerges in the litigation. The ACLU lists Gatlin among fourteen people known to have been wrongfully arrested in the US because police relied on erroneous facial-recognition results.

Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 26/09/2026

1 Aug 2024 to 1 Oct 2024United StatesFACES facial recognition

Florida: 93% facial-recognition hit led to Robert Dillon's arrest as an attempted child abductor; charges dropped, ACLU suit filed

In August 2024, Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old self-employed commercial crabber from the Fort Myers area, was arrested at his San Carlos Park home on a third-degree felony warrant for the attempted luring of a child at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald's in November 2023 — a crime he had no part in. The warrant rested on a 93%-confidence result from FACES, the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System maintained by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, run against low-resolution cell-phone photos of a surveillance screen, plus a restaurant employee's photo-lineup identification. Dillon spent a night in jail and bonded out against his truck's title; prosecutors dropped the charges in October 2024 after work-alibi evidence, but it took about a year to expunge the arrest and remove his mugshot. In June 2026 the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit (M.D. Fla.) against Jacksonville Beach, the Jacksonville sheriff and the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, calling Dillon one of at least 14 known wrongful arrests from police reliance on facial recognition since 2019.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 15/09/2026

26 Aug 2026 to 28 Aug 2026SpainUnidentified Google AI tool (reported)

Argentine activist reports threats after an alleged Google AI misidentification

On 26 August 2026, WhatsApp groups in Ceuta circulated videos and images claiming that Argentine political scientist and activist Flavia Broffoni — who was in Patagonia and had not been to Spain since 2014 — was a woman filmed in Ceuta allegedly giving pepper spray to Moroccan migrants. A screenshot from one group shows that a user cropped the woman's face from the video and asked a Google AI tool who she was, with the word 'activista' as context; the answer identified her as Flavia Broffoni with details of her public profile. Broffoni received death and rape threats. La Nación's own test with the same video produced a different false identification — a student from Quilmes, with her personal data. Google Argentina said it could not confirm the screenshot came from its systems without the original link and had received no formal report. Broffoni is weighing legal action with her lawyer.

Contextual tracker case High reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 15/09/2026

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.

Methodology and corrections · Subscribe via RSS · Suggest a case or correction · Find support

Last dataset update: 23/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.