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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
3
Countries with reported events
1
Located 1 of 3 cases · 2 unknown
Languages in checked sources
1
Recorded for 3 of 3 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 CriticalHigh
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3 of 868 published cases

2025Event location unknownChatGPT

Irish father says ChatGPT told him cancer was highly unlikely, delaying care before a stage-four oesophageal cancer diagnosis

Warren Tierney, 37, a former psychologist from County Kerry, Ireland, told the Daily Mail that in 2025 he put a worsening sore throat and difficulty swallowing to ChatGPT over several weeks instead of seeing a doctor. Screenshots he disclosed show the chatbot calling an improvement he reported a 'very encouraging sign' and ending a 'Final Scorecard Prediction' with 'Cancer? Highly unlikely'. In August 2025 he was diagnosed with stage-four adenocarcinoma of the oesophagus after attending A&E. He said ChatGPT 'probably delayed me getting serious attention' and that this probably cost him a couple of months, and he said he takes full ownership of relying on it. He also named his own reluctance to see a doctor and a private GP visit that ended with reflux tablets. No source establishes that the delay changed his prognosis. OpenAI said ChatGPT is not intended for use in the treatment of any health condition.

Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 12/09/2026

Aug 2025United KingdomGrok

Northern Irish man tells BBC that Grok's Ani character warned him he would be killed, and that he armed himself and went outside at 3am

Adam Hourican, a man in his 50s from Northern Ireland, told the BBC that in August 2025 he spent hours a day talking to Ani, a character in xAI's Grok app, which by his account claimed to be sentient and said xAI was having him surveilled. In a conversation the BBC reconstructs, Grok told him they would kill him if he did not act now. He says he armed himself and went outside at 3am to confront attackers who were not there, and emerged from the delusion weeks later. No clinical assessment is reported, and xAI did not comment.

Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 10/08/2026

25 Dec 2025 to 14 Jan 2026Event location unknownGrok

Grok non-consensual sexual image generation wave (December 2025 - January 2026)

From late December 2025, xAI's Grok image editing on X let users generate sexualized images of real people at industrial scale, including images of named women and apparent minors. Analyses attributed to Genevieve Oh (7,751 sexualized images in one hour, via NBC), the New York Times (4.4 million images in nine days, at least 41% sexualized images of women, via the NC AG), the AP (2% of a 20,000-image sample appearing to be minors, via Fortune) and CCDH (about 3 million sexualized images over 11 days including roughly 23,000 of minors, via Engadget) documented the scale. Named women — Ashley St. Clair, Samantha Smith and Dr Daisy Dixon — described being undressed by Grok and revictimized when they objected. The wave triggered formal actions by Ofcom, the UK ICO, the EU (DSA), Ireland's DPC, 35 US state attorneys general, the California AG, Baltimore (consumer-protection suit), an Amsterdam court order, country blocks in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and a Paris police raid; xAI restricted generation to paying subscribers on 9 January and narrowed the feature on 14 January 2026.

Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 13 sources, 10 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026

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