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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
2
Countries with reported events
2
Located 2 of 2 cases · 0 unknown
Languages in checked sources
3
Recorded for 2 of 2 cases

2 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 0 not yet reviewed and 2 reviewed as unknown. Show these 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 MediumLow
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2 of 507 published cases

Jun 2026United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers

Plymouth, Minnesota: police boxed in and detained an automotive journalist and the journalist's wife for about an hour in June 2026 after Flock cameras matched a loaned Range Rover's plate to an incomplete stolen-plate entry

An automotive journalist for The Drive wrote that on a Sunday afternoon in late June four Plymouth police cars boxed in the Range Rover press vehicle the journalist was testing, in a Kohl's parking lot. Officers ordered the journalist and the journalist's wife out, patted the journalist down, questioned both and said the plates were stolen. According to the account, officers said they had tracked the vehicle for days through Flock license-plate cameras and acted on a camera alert that morning. The couple were released after about an hour, once the manufacturer explained that a similar plate had been reported stolen in California. In a follow-up, Flock's chief communications officer said the stolen plate had been entered without its two middle digits and that the system matched what it was asked to find. The spokesperson said an alert does not equal probable cause. The police chief acknowledged that officers did not get it right. A second journalist with a similar plate was later stopped in Nebraska.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 05/10/2026

21 Sept 2026 to 25 Sept 2026FrancePangram AI-text detector

France: the Académie Goncourt removes Thélyson Orélien's bestselling novel from its prize selection, saying it is in all likelihood largely AI-generated, days after an anonymous X account publicised Pangram AI-detector scores; the author denies using AI, and the Académie also cites separate plagiarism in his older texts

On 21 September 2026 an anonymous X account, Balance ton Claude, said it had run excerpts of Thélyson Orélien's debut novel C'était ça ou mourir through the American AI-detection software Pangram, with some passages scoring up to 100 per cent probability of AI generation. On 25 September the Académie Goncourt removed the novel from the first selection of sixteen books for its 2026 prize, stating that the work is 'in all likelihood very largely the product of an artificial intelligence', based on 'the convergent result of several analyses by researchers and journalists', and also citing plagiarism in older texts by the author published in Canada (at least one short story and articles), which do not concern the novel. Orélien, a 38-year-old Canadian-Haitian writer whose novel had won the Fnac novel prize, denies using AI and says its repetitions and certain rhythms reflect his linguistic and cultural world and may be misread by automated tools. His Montreal publisher Boréal suspended promotional activities, saying it could neither confirm nor refute the allegations. Essayist Samuel Fitoussi said he was one of the people behind the account. Whether AI was used to write the novel is disputed; AI-detector reliability is itself contested in the coverage.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026

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: 05/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.