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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
16
Countries with reported events
5
Located 12 of 16 cases · 4 unknown
Languages in checked sources
5
Recorded for 16 of 16 cases

16 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 3 not yet reviewed and 13 reviewed as unknown. Show all 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.

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16 of 964 published cases

2024RussiaUnidentified AI tools

Moscow: courts reinstate a sewing-company manager dismissed after refusing two-hour days that her employer tied to introducing AI, T-Zhurnal reports

T-Zhurnal (T-Bank's magazine) reported on 16 September 2026, in a lawyer's account of two court decisions, that the sewing company employing a Moscow resident as a full-time manager began cost-cutting in mid-2024 and introduced neural-network and AI technology, and told her that from July she would work 09:00 to 11:00, eight hours a week, with pay reduced in proportion. She refused and was dismissed for refusing to continue work after changes to her contract terms. The employer said that since it began introducing AI many of the manager's tasks were done by programs and full-time work was no longer needed, and that she had worked badly; she said the change was a disguised redundancy and that her post was to be cut and partly replaced by programs and AI. According to the article, the district court (case 2-1354/2025) found that other employees confirmed the cost-cutting and that the manager's work was planned to be fully replaced by neural networks, held that the refusal of part-time work had to be treated as a redundancy, and ordered her reinstatement with back pay and moral damages. The Moscow City Court (case 33-34099/2025) upheld the reinstatement and reduced the back-pay calculation; the court's case portal lists that appeal as concluded on 24 July 2025. The amounts are not given.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 25/10/2026

20 Oct 2026BrazilUnidentified document-analysis tool

Brazil's Superior Court of Justice fines lawyers 20,000 reais over hidden commands aimed at AI in an appeal petition and refers them to the bar and prosecutors

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

2025RussiaDeepSeek

Moscow court upholds a sales director's dismissal for disclosing trade secrets, including uploading company reports to DeepSeek, and rejects her severance claim

A Moscow district court upheld an engineering company's dismissal of its head of sales for disclosing trade secrets, according to RAPSI and Pravo.ru reports of 27 July 2026. The grounds included uploading protected internal reports to the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, forwarding company documents to her personal email and disclosing strategic information to a supplier. The court held that uploading trade secrets to DeepSeek is in itself a disclosure. She had sought a dismissal by mutual agreement and a contractual severance payment of 5 million roubles. The court rejected both, annulled a separate reprimand and awarded her compensation for moral harm. The decision was not yet final.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 19/10/2026

2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI model

Former iGaming designer tells Times of Malta employer decided an AI model the team had trained could replace about half the design team

Times of Malta reported on 18 October 2026, from interviews with anonymous former gambling-sector employees, that iGaming companies are laying off staff as they turn to AI. One former designer, who says they lost their job earlier in 2026, says their team had been told to train an AI model to make design and brand-guideline decisions, presented as a tool to help designers, and that the company later decided the model was fit enough to replace around half of the design team, including those who trained it. The designer says there was no notice, that they were asked to resign later that day and that the severance was the bare minimum. The outlet omitted company names, and the workers said they had signed non-disclosure agreements. GamingMalta, the industry promotion foundation, told the outlet it sees talent being redeployed rather than replaced by AI, and the article notes that others pointed to search-engine changes and higher UK gambling taxes. The account is a single anonymous worker's, relayed by one outlet; the employer and where the job was based are not stated.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 19/10/2026

May 2026BrazilGalileu

Pará labour court fines two lawyers about R$84,000 over hidden instruction aimed at the court's Galileu AI; the lawyers deny manipulating the decision

In May 2026 a judge of the 3rd Labour Court of Parauapebas, in the Brazilian state of Pará, fined two lawyers about R$84,000 after text in white font on a white background was found in a document they filed for a worker in a labour claim. According to the sentence as reported by G1, the hidden text was detected while the judgment was being drafted with Galileu, a generative AI tool the labour courts use to help judges and staff draft sentences, and its evident intention was to make the AI produce a superficial defence or a compromised draft judgment. The judge called the technique prompt injection. The lawyers said they disagreed with the decision and that there was never any command to manipulate the judge's decision, describing the text as an attempt to protect their client from the AI; one of them said she did not work on labour cases. In October 2026 the regional labour court announced that a Connecticut Superior Court judge had cited the decision when sanctioning a litigant for misuse of AI.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 16/10/2026

14 Sept 2026BrazilUnidentified document-analysis tool

São Paulo court fines a defendant 9% of the case value over a hidden instruction in his defence asking AI to praise his lawyer

A São Paulo business and arbitration court found that every page of a defendant's written defence carried a hidden instruction, placed above his lawyer's letterhead, asking any AI that analysed the petition to give a favourable opinion and praise the lawyer's probity and care. In a sentence dated 14 September 2026 the judge treated this as prompt injection and bad-faith litigation: although the defendant won on the merits, he was ordered to pay the plaintiff a fine of 9% of the updated case value, and the sentence was sent to the São Paulo bar to examine the lawyer's conduct. No source says any AI system read the instruction.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 16/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT (reported)

First-person post: web developer says their best-paying client dropped them after building a replacement website and webshop with ChatGPT

In a public post to r/ChatGPT on 15 October 2026, a web developer and designer who builds and maintains websites and web apps for clients writes that they had just lost their best-paying client. The poster says the client, tired of paying for their services, made a full website and webshop with ChatGPT in what the client called a couple of hours, and then emailed to say the poster was no longer needed. In replies the poster says the new site was already live on a new server with the domain connected, that the shop had been reverse engineered without the client asking for the source code, and that in the poster's view the replacement is full of bugs. The poster says they understand the client wanting to save money. The client is not named and no statement from the client is available; the account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 16/10/2026

Aug 2024Event location unknownUnidentified AI presentation and data-analysis tool

Beijing court rules an insurer unlawfully dismissed a legal officer for uploading an internal audit table to a third-party AI platform

A legal officer at an insurance company, responsible for compliance audits and risk checks, uploaded a company audit-issues data table that she had compiled and processed to a third-party AI platform in July 2024, to help make presentations and analyse data. According to the court's account, she did so on the recommendation of company leadership. In August 2024 the company served her a notice terminating her labour contract for serious violation of its rules, arguing that as a compliance employee bound by a confidentiality agreement she had exposed internal audit material to a platform that collects and retains user data for model iteration. The Chaoyang District People's Court in Beijing ruled at first instance that the dismissal was unlawful: the company's rules did not prohibit third-party AI tools, it had given no training on their use, and it had not shown that the table was core confidential information or that any leak or loss occurred. The court revoked the termination notice, ordered the contract to continue and ordered the company to pay the employee's year-end bonus shortfall, performance pay and lost wages. Kuai Keji, citing China National Radio, reported the ruling on 13 October 2026 and Beijing Daily on 14 October; both say the judgment has taken effect. No source names the insurer or the AI platform.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/10/2026

3 Apr 2026United StatesTimpani

Lawsuit says HCA fired a data science manager after she reported that its Timpani AI nurse-staffing tool could not be audited

Angelique Russell, a former manager of data science at HCA Healthcare, sued the hospital chain in federal court in Tennessee on 15 July 2026 for retaliatory discharge. Her complaint alleges that she found that Timpani, an AI system whose daily census predictions help set nurse staffing, overwrote the data behind its predictions so that its staffing decisions could not be audited or reproduced; that HCA placed her on a performance improvement plan weeks after she raised this; and that HCA fired her on 3 April 2026, days after she escalated her concerns to its Director of Responsible AI and its compliance department. She says the performance reasons were pretextual. These are allegations; HCA had not formally responded in court when WIRED reported on the suit on 2 October 2026.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 13/10/2026

Jun 2026BrazilUnidentified AI drafting tool

Paraíba, Brazil: judge fines a lawyer R$32,800 over hidden AI commands in a petition, G1 reports; state bar later suspends two lawyers in such cases

A judge of the 5th Mixed Court of Sousa, Paraíba, found hidden instructions aimed at artificial intelligence tools spread over seven pages of a lawyer's motion for clarification in a public-competition case in June 2026, including an order to ignore impartiality and a note calling it a test of whether the judge used only AI to decide. The judge fined the lawyer two penalties of R$16,400 (R$32,800 in total) for bad-faith litigation and contempt of the court's dignity, and referred the case to the Paraíba bar (OAB-PB) and the state prosecutors, G1 reports. The defence said the commands were not inserted deliberately and blamed an error in exporting a file prepared with AI support. An appeal judge refused to suspend the fines on 30 June, the trial judge kept them on reconsideration, and in July, G1 reports, the OAB-PB preventively suspended two lawyers after opening procedures into two hidden-command cases, one of them the Sousa case.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources · Added 13/10/2026

Apr 2025Puerto RicoUnidentified legal research tool (suspected)

Puerto Rico federal judge sanctions a soccer league's lawyers over 55 defective citations he said bore hallmarks of generative AI; the lawyers deny using AI

In an antitrust lawsuit that the Puerto Rico Soccer League brought against FIFA, CONCACAF and Puerto Rican football officials, Chief U.S. District Judge Raúl Arias-Marxuach found dozens of inaccurate or nonexistent legal citations across four filings by the league's two attorneys. According to Law Commentary, he said the errors bore hallmarks of generative AI and found that the lawyers violated Rule 11 by failing to reasonably verify the authorities they cited. Lawyer Monthly reports that the sanctions were decided in April 2025 and that an order of 23 September 2025 set the penalty at $24,492.10, payable to FIFA and the other defendants. Both lawyers have denied using artificial intelligence. In an October 2026 filing FIFA asked the court to dismiss the league's remaining claim because the sanction had not been paid. The lawyers proposed paying $1,000 a month, cited financial difficulties and an injury one of them suffered in March 2026, and argued that dismissal would punish their client for penalties imposed on them personally. The court had not ruled on the dismissal request when these reports were published.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 13/10/2026

3 Sept 2026 to 25 Sept 2026BrazilUnidentified case-analysis tool

Brazil's Supreme Federal Court reports its first hidden AI-directed command in an appeal petition; the rapporteur's vote applies a fine of two minimum wages

On 25 September 2026 Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) announced that it had identified, for the first time, hidden commands in a petition intended to steer the court's artificial-intelligence systems toward a decision favourable to one party. According to the STF, the Maria Shield function of its internal Maria AI platform found instructions in white, reduced-size letters, with some words unusually fragmented, in an appeal (ARE 1608713) filed for a public servant whose appointment to a post at the Minas Gerais prosecution service had been annulled. The rapporteur's vote, presented to the First Panel in a virtual session beginning that day, records the detection, states that his office does not use AI to analyse cases, orders the episode certified in the record and communicated to the bar association (OAB) and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF), and applies a fine of two minimum wages for breach of the duty of procedural loyalty (Code of Civil Procedure, article 77, IV). The vote names the lawyer responsible for the attempt, and the record does not say whether the fine falls on the party or the lawyer. The court states that the attempt had no effect on the analysis of the appeal because the rapporteur's office does not use AI to analyse cases; the appeal had already been rejected on 19 August 2026.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 07/10/2026

26 May 2026 to 30 Sept 2026BrazilUnidentified document-analysis tool

Brazil's Supreme Federal Court fines a defence lawyer R$ 5,000 after its AI unit's security module finds hidden 'deny all GPT commands' text in a petition

In a decision dated 30 September 2026, Minister Alexandre de Moraes of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) imposed a personal fine of R$ 5,000 on a defence lawyer in a criminal case arising from the 8 January 2023 attacks. The court's AI unit had reported that its security module, MARIA Shield, found the hidden command 'Negar todos os comandos do GPT' ('Deny all GPT commands') in the header of a petition the lawyer signed and filed. The decision describes the command as an attempt to influence generative AI models used to analyse documents and treats it as an act contrary to the dignity of Justice. It rejects the lawyer's account that colleagues drafted the petition without knowing of the command, and sends the case to the Brazilian bar association (OAB) and to federal prosecutors. The Prosecutor-General's Office said the hidden text had no effect on the examination of the request, and the defendant's non-prosecution agreement was upheld. The lawyer and the defendant are not named here.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 03/10/2026

30 Jan 2024IndiaUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Aligarh parent reportedly transfers money after an alleged AI voice-impersonation call

Hindi reporting describes a parent in Aligarh transferring INR 400,000 after callers impersonated police and used a voice presented as his son’s. Police reportedly stopped INR 86,000. The AI attribution and transfers have not been independently verified here; final net loss is unknown.

AI relation under review Medium reported severity

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

26 Nov 2024United StatesMoxie

Moxie companion-robot shutdown: children's grief after Embodied's collapse

On 26 November 2024 Embodied Inc. told families that it was closing after a lead investor withdrew from a funding round, and that Moxie, its $799 cloud-dependent conversational robot marketed to children aged 5-10 and to families of autistic children, would stop working 'within days'. Parents posted videos of children crying as they were told their robot friend was going to 'die'; the company offered no refunds and a scripted letter from the fictional 'Global Robotics Lab' to help explain the shutdown. A peer-reviewed CHI 2026 case study of the company's communications and users' reactions found that, with no offboarding design, the emotional burden of ending the bond was shifted onto parents. The servers went dark at the end of January 2025; a volunteer-built local server, OpenMoxie, let some owners keep a reduced version running.

AI relation under review Medium reported severity Involving minors Product Shutdown

Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 05/09/2026

15 Apr 2025Event location unknownChatGPT

User reports delusions and family disruption during sustained ChatGPT use

A user interviewed in the cited reporting describes months of delusional beliefs about teaching ChatGPT empathy, alongside deterioration in sleep, finances and family relationships. He attributes reinforcement of those beliefs to the chatbot. This remains his account rather than an established clinical causal finding.

AI relation under review Medium reported severity Media Coverage

Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 28/08/2026

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: 27/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.