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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 is wider: it also records consequential decisions and claims about people. Each account is reviewed for publication; claims may remain uncorroborated or disputed. How we review and count cases

In this selection

Published cases
4
Countries with reported events
1
Located 4 of 4 cases · 0 unknown
Languages in checked sources
2
Recorded for 4 of 4 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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4 of 404 published cases

Event date unknownIndiaUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Indore police report Rs 1.83 lakh loss after a voice impersonation of a relative

Indore police told The Times of India that a local resident transferred Rs 1.83 lakh after callers used a purported AI-generated voice to impersonate his brother-in-law abroad. The callers claimed an expired visa would lead to imprisonment or job loss unless fees were paid. The victim discovered the fraud after speaking to the real relative the next day. Police said they coordinated account freezes and were working on recovery. The first call date and recovery outcome are unknown.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 30/09/2026

6 Jan 2026IndiaUnidentified voice-cloning tool (suspected)

Indore play school operator reports losing Rs 97,500 after a call in a voice matching a relative's that police preliminarily attribute to AI voice cloning

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

1 Jul 2025 to 30 Jan 2026IndiaUnidentified image tool

Indore: an engineer was arrested at the end of January 2026 for a seven-month campaign of posting morphed obscene images of a woman and her sister, with threatening letters, to their relatives and neighbours and pasting posters near their home after the family rejected his marriage proposal; one Hindi report attributes the morphing to AI, citing a police forensic finding (Times of India, Free Press Journal, Patrika, NewsTak, 30-31 January 2026)

Indore police said at the end of January 2026 that the crime branch had arrested an engineer working as a data analyst after a woman complained at Banganga police station in July 2025 that an unknown person was mailing letters with abusive content and morphed nude photographs of her and her sister to her, her relatives and neighbours, and pasting posters near their house, causing mental harassment and social embarrassment. Police said the accused had approached the complainant's sister through a matrimonial website, that the proposal fell through over a horoscope mismatch, and that he then sought revenge by sending the material about seven times between July 2025 and January 2026 from post offices in Ujjain, Dewas, Khategaon, Ashta and Dhar, wearing a mask and cap and changing buses to avoid being traced; NewsTak adds that he also threatened the family with an acid attack and that a laptop and printer were seized. The case was registered under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the IT Act and the SC/ST Act and he was remanded. Patrika reports that the obscene images were created with AI and that police said digital forensics found AI-generated images; the English reports describe them as morphed without naming the technology, so the AI attribution rests on one outlet.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/06/2026

Mar 2026IndiaUnidentified image and video tool

Indore: a first-year college student complained in May 2026 that a man she met at her sister's wedding edited her photographs with AI into objectionable images after she refused to marry him, blackmailed her with them and, after approaching her fiancé (the reports differ on how), caused her engagement to be broken off; she had been contemplating suicide before confiding in her family (Navbharat Times, Amar Ujala, Patrika, 12-13 May 2026)

Indore police registered an FIR at Banganga police station on a first-year college student's complaint reported on 12 and 13 May 2026. She said she had met the accused, a young man from the Indore area, at her sister's wedding in 2024, where he took some photographs of her; he later pressed her to marry him and, when she refused, threatened to edit her photographs with AI into objectionable (Navbharat Times, Amar Ujala) or obscene (Patrika) images and post them online. Navbharat Times reports that he edited the pictures with AI, blackmailed her with them and, after her family arranged her engagement elsewhere, reached her fiancé and showed him the edited pictures, after which the families quarrelled and the engagement was broken; Patrika says he went to the fiancé's home and intimidated him into breaking the match; Amar Ujala says he also threatened to kill her and her family and sent edited pictures when her family tried to reason with him, and that when her engagement took place about two months earlier he went to her house and made false allegations about her character in front of the prospective fiancé, after which the engagement broke. She went into severe mental distress and, according to Amar Ujala, had resolved to take a suicidal step before telling her family, who took her to the police. The FIR was registered under the IT Act and sections on criminal intimidation and defamation; police were searching for the accused.

Core concern High reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/06/2026

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: 30/09/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.