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NOPE

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

Explore incidents Our scope and evidence

In this selection

Published cases
2
Countries with reported events
1
Located 1 of 2 cases · 1 unknown
Languages in checked sources
1
Recorded for 2 of 2 cases
2Core concern
AI communicated, acted for, depicted or impersonated 0Contextual cases
AI made a decision or claim about someone

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.

0cases with a recorded lawsuit outcome 0cases with a recorded regulatory response 0cases involving minors

Response counts currently use each case’s principal recorded outcome. Further proceedings may be described in its account.

When events happened

0 cases without a known event year

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.

1 20241 2026
Reported severity HighMedium
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2 of 392 published cases

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10 Jul 2026ChinaUnidentified chatbot

Chuzhou, Anhui: a 67-year-old farmer sprayed 150 mu of sesame by drone with an AI assistant's 'weeding and pest-control plan' that named a soybean-field herbicide; the seedlings died overnight

On 10 July 2026 a 67-year-old farmer in Chuzhou, Anhui, who said he had relied on an AI assistant app for more than a year for questions such as when to spray and fertilise, asked it for a weeding and pest-control plan for his sesame field and then for a drone-spraying version. The app produced a 'full plan for 100-mu sesame aerial weeding and pest control' recommending the herbicides haloxyfop-P-methyl (高效氟吡甲禾灵) and fomesafen (氟磺胺草醚) and two insecticides. He sprayed the whole 150-mu field; the next day grass and seedlings had died together. A nearby pesticide dealer and an agronomist told Lizhi News (Jiangsu Broadcasting) that fomesafen is a broadleaf herbicide for soybean fields that must not be sprayed on sesame, and that spraying it across a whole field kills the crop; asked afterwards, the app itself said fomesafen was the cause. The chat window carried a small header line saying AI output may be wrong and should be verified, which he said he had never noticed. The app's customer service said the software has no knowledge base of its own and assembles answers from public web content, and logged the loss for follow-up; no reply or compensation was reported by publication on 1 August 2026. Relays put the loss at about 150,000 yuan; that figure is not in the text of the originating report.

Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 20/09/2026

1 Apr 2024 to 5 Jan 2025Event location unknownUnidentified image tool

Jiangsu, China (Zhangjiagang court): a man used AI face-swap deep-synthesis to splice the faces of a person referred to as Yu and several others onto pornographic images, fabricated 'sexual' stories about them and posted the material repeatedly on overseas websites between April 2024 and January 2025; after two face-swapped nude images of Yu and Yu's ID were forwarded to Yu's work WeChat group with a fabricated claim of sex-for-money transactions, he was convicted of criminal defamation and sentenced to one year and three months (1 December 2025), upheld on appeal and listed by the Jiangsu High People's Court among its 2025 typical cases

According to the Jiangsu High People's Court's 2025 top-ten typical cases, published on 27 January 2026 and reported by The Paper, a man surnamed Wang used the deep-synthesis technology of AI software between April 2024 and January 2025 to splice the facial information of a person (pseudonym Yu) and several other people onto pornographic images, fabricated a large number of indecent images and 'sexual' topics about them, and repeatedly spread them in public posts on overseas websites. On 5 January 2025 he sent two AI face-swapped nude images bearing Yu's face and images of Yu's identity documents to a second man (dealt with separately) and fabricated the claim that he had had a sex-for-money transaction with Yu; although the second man said he would forward the material to Yu's work WeChat group, Wang did not clarify that it was false or effectively stop him, only deleting the contact. The second man forwarded the images to the WeChat group and claimed there that Yu sold sex, prompting extensive discussion inside and outside the group and, the court found, adverse effects on Yu's personal image, work and life, a serious lowering of Yu's social evaluation and a violation of Yu's dignity. The Zhangjiagang People's Court held that using deep-synthesis technology that ordinary people cannot easily identify to generate indecent images and fabricate sexual topics, spread repeatedly through information networks, was defamation of serious circumstances that seriously harmed social order; taking into account his voluntary surrender, it sentenced him on 1 December 2025 to one year and three months' imprisonment for defamation. The Suzhou Intermediate People's Court rejected his appeal. The High Court described the case as a typical example of punishing online defamation committed with AI.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · 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.