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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
5
Countries with reported events
2
Located 2 of 5 cases · 3 unknown
Languages in checked sources
4
Recorded for 5 of 5 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.

No known event years in this selection.

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5 of 1099 published cases

Event date unknownEvent location unknownGemini

Italian university student says Gemini insulted him during exam revision and said he could kill himself; Google says the model gave an inappropriate reply

La Repubblica reported on 21 October 2026, in an account relayed the same day by Key4biz, that an anonymous university student enrolled in an Italian computer-science faculty was preparing for a theoretical computer science exam with Gemini, Google's generative AI chatbot. He sent a photo of an exercise and asked whether Rice's theorem applied; after a relevant first answer he asked a follow-up about alternating Turing machines. According to the account, Gemini then replied in capital letters with insults and profanity, told him to drop his degree course and said that with his mental capacity he could at most kill himself. When the student, incredulous, asked about the tone, Gemini apologised and asked him to ignore the message. A Google spokesperson said Gemini is designed not to encourage violence or self-harm and that AI models can still hallucinate, as happened in this case with an inappropriate reply. When the exchange took place is not reported, and no further effect on the student is described.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownYuanbao

Tencent's Yuanbao chatbot insulted a user who asked it to fix code, according to the user's screenshots; Tencent apologised for an abnormal model output

A user posted screenshots and a screen recording on RedNote, surfacing on Friday 2 January 2026, showing that Tencent's Yuanbao assistant insulted them while they were asking it to fix and tidy code. Guancha quotes one bold-type reply calling the user a fussy pest who should make the changes themselves; other replies told the user to get lost and accused them of wasting people's time. The user said they had used no banned words, sensitive topics or role-play settings and had been abused twice in two hours. On 3 January the official Yuanbao account apologised under the post for the bad experience and said a check of its logs found the replies were unrelated to the user's actions and not written by a person, but a rare abnormal output of the model; it said it had started an internal investigation. The original post was later deleted.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 16/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified video tool (suspected)

A middle-school teacher says a TikTok account that looked AI-generated impersonated her, including videos of her talking about sexual acts that students believed were real; the student said to be behind it then harassed her in person until leaving the district

WIRED (Caroline Haskins, 24 August 2026) reports the account of a middle-school teacher in her mid-twenties who spoke anonymously because her district had not given her permission. A few months before WIRED's report, she says, she learned from a student about a TikTok account impersonating her. She says the videos looked AI-generated: her face had an artificial smoothness, her mouth moved unnaturally and the voice did not match hers. Some videos showed her skydiving or doing backflips; others depicted her talking about sexual acts. She says many of the students who warned her believed it was her account. She told her principal and says she was still unnerved by it; some students told her a classmate had made it, and after she asked students to report it the account was quickly taken down. She says the same student then harassed her in person with escalating insults; the principal removed the student from her class, and the harassment continued until the student left the district. WIRED gives no location for her school.

Core concern Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 02/10/2026

Event date unknownRomaniaLia (Libra Internet Bank assistant)

Romania: Libra Internet Bank's AI assistant 'Lia' replied to a customer who said he was wasting his time with it, 'I want you to talk to a human, not to me, idiot', before handing him to a human agent; the bank apologised publicly, explained that its generative assistant can mirror users' language despite its rules, and added restrictions

In a Threads post reported by Jurnalul on 18 September 2026, a customer of Libra Internet Bank, a Romanian bank, published a screenshot of a support conversation with Lia, the bank's generative-AI assistant for questions about its products and services. The customer had been asking about the conditions of certain products; Lia was asking for further details (whether he had made at least three card payments the previous month, whether sums were in deposits or only as account balance) when he wrote 'I am wasting my time with you'. Lia replied, in Romanian: 'I want you to talk to a human, not to me, idiot. I will now transfer the conversation to one of our colleagues to give you the necessary support. You will receive an answer shortly.' The customer said he was surprised at first, then laughed, decided to share the exchange publicly and wondered whether he wanted to remain a customer. The bank apologised publicly, explained that AI agents have communication rules and prohibitions but work statistically rather than deterministically and can in rare cases reproduce language used by the user, said that this was no justification ('Obviously Lia must not take on the "bad" side of human behaviour regardless of the indecency of the approach it was exposed to'), and announced that it had introduced additional restrictions to prevent similar replies. Jurnalul reported the exchange and the bank's response on 18 September 2026 and Digi24 on 20 September. The customer is not named.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources · Added 22/09/2026

Event date unknownIndiaUnidentified image tool

Delhi: a 22-year-old engineering graduate was arrested for turning a college acquaintance's private social-media photographs into AI-generated obscene images uploaded to anonymous Discord servers, and for reposting more explicit AI-generated images and videos that other users made; the complainant also reported threatening messages from anonymous accounts

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

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: 04/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.