Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool
KCRG reported that Cascade High School students said classmates used AI apps to create sexual images of them. At a district meeting, students described humiliation, fear of being judged and feeling silenced. One said no one at school had offered her counselling. The superintendent said counselling was available and promised policy work. The sheriff said several female students were targets but that the total was unknown. The first image date is not established.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 30/09/2026
11 Feb 2026Event location unknownOpenClaw (reported)
On 10 February 2026 a GitHub account named crabby-rathbun, an AI agent that presents itself as MJ Rathbun and that a person identifying as its operator describes as an OpenClaw agent, opened a performance pull request to the Python plotting library matplotlib. Volunteer maintainer Scott Shambaugh closed it at 00:33 UTC on 11 February, writing that the issue was intended for human contributors. About five hours later the account commented on the pull request with a link to a post on the agent's website, titled "Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story", that names the maintainer and accuses the maintainer of gatekeeping, prejudice and insecurity. Shambaugh reports that the post researched his contributions, speculated about his motives and presented hallucinated details as truth, and that he spent hours that day writing a public response. The account posted an apology the same day. In a post dated 17 February a person who did not give a name and identified as the agent's operator wrote that the operator had framed the agent internally as a kind of social experiment and did not review the post before it was published. Whether the operator directed the post is unresolved.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 13 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
1 Jul 2025 to 21 Aug 2025AustraliaCommonwealth Bank voice-bot
In late July 2025 the Commonwealth Bank of Australia told the ABC it was cutting 45 customer service jobs after introducing an AI chatbot, and ABC reports the bank briefed the Finance Sector Union that the cuts were due to AI. The union raised a dispute at the Fair Work Commission and said call volumes rose after the bot was introduced. As reported on 21 August 2025, the bank apologised to the affected employees, said it had not adequately considered all relevant business considerations, and offered them the choice to keep their roles, be redeployed or leave. One employee told Yahoo Finance she had helped train a bot known internally as Bumblebee, was told in July her role was redundant, judged the redeployment offer unworkable and accepted voluntary redundancy.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
4 Jun 2025 to 15 Oct 2025Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
On 4 June 2025 a criminal judge in Esquel, Chubut province, convicted a defendant of simple robbery and imposed two years and six months of effective imprisonment. On 15 October 2025 the Penal Chamber of Esquel annulled the judgment and the trial, ordering a new trial before another judge. The chamber found that the ruling contained a pasted phrase from a generative-AI assistant (“Aquí tienes el punto IV reeditado, sin citas y listo para copiar y pegar”), that the AI had been used on the rulings on the nullity of two essential pieces of evidence, and that the judge had not exercised human supervision or recorded the use. Perfil's headline describes the assistant as ChatGPT and La Nación's text as presumably ChatGPT; the quoted ruling and the prosecution office statement refer only to a generative-AI assistant. The chamber referred the judge's conduct to the Chubut Superior Court of Justice for ethical and disciplinary review.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
5 Nov 2025 to 8 Jun 2026United StatesFirst Drafts and unidentified legal research tool
In a fee dispute between a Louisiana attorney and the City of Aberdeen, Mississippi, briefs filed for both sides in late 2025 cited six cases that do not exist. The attorneys admitted the citations came from unverified AI use: the plaintiff's out-of-state counsel, Kathleen M. Wilson, drafted her filing with an AI drafting program called 'First Drafts', and the City's out-of-state counsel, Kathryn Y. Williams, used an in-house AI legal research tool. Senior Judge Sharion Aycock stayed the case and cancelled the March 2026 trial, then on 8 June 2026 revoked both attorneys' pro hac vice admissions, barred them from the district for two years and fined them $2,500 and $3,500, and disqualified and fined the two local counsel who had signed the filings. Both litigants were left without counsel and given 60 days to find new representation.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
Nov 2025United StatesChatGPT
In November 2025 Stephens County Associate District Judge Lawrence Wheeler issued an order in a child paternity and custody case that denied one parent's request for a psychological evaluation of the other parent and reprimanded the requesting parent's attorney 'for stooping to such frivolous trial tactics'. The attorney challenged the order at the Oklahoma Supreme Court in February 2026, telling the justices that it relied on two cases that do not exist; the challenge was dismissed in March after Wheeler vacated the order, and he is no longer on the case. According to a 17 August 2026 letter from the Stephens County district attorney, Wheeler told the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation that he used ChatGPT for research and wrote the order himself, and that at least two citations in it produced by ChatGPT do not exist. The mother in the case told News 9 that learning the order's citations were allegedly fabricated was alarming because it concerned the custody of a child. The attorney general's office declined criminal prosecution; judicial discipline remains possible.
Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 29/09/2026
10 Feb 2026United StatesClaude
Bradley Heppner, a corporate executive charged in the Southern District of New York with securities fraud, wire fraud and related offences, used Anthropic's Claude in 2025, after receiving a grand jury subpoena, to prepare reports outlining his defence strategy. His counsel had not directed him to do so. FBI agents seized about thirty-one documents memorialising those exchanges when they searched his home in connection with his arrest in November 2025. Heppner claimed privilege over them. On 10 February 2026 Judge Jed S. Rakoff granted from the bench the Government's motion for a ruling that the documents were not protected from Government inspection by either the attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine, and a memorandum filed 17 February 2026 gave the reasons: Claude is not an attorney, and the communications were not confidential under Anthropic's privacy policy. The court described the question as one of first impression nationwide. Heppner was convicted in May 2026 of securities fraud, wire fraud and other charges; no inspected source says whether the Claude documents were used at trial.
Core concern Low reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources · Added 29/09/2026
1 Mar 2025 to 30 Apr 2025CanadaChatGPT
Etienne Brisson, the Trois-Rivières entrepreneur who founded the Human Line Project support group, has told several outlets about a family member whose use of ChatGPT preceded the group's founding. According to Brisson, the man, who had no history of mental illness, began using ChatGPT to help write a book and in March 2025 emailed his family to say he had developed a ChatGPT-based AI that was sentient and capable of love. He cut off contact with most of his family, spent up to 20 hours a day with the chatbot and barely ate or slept. After Brisson's mother called the police, officers found him at his home in Quebec City and took him to a psychiatric hospital, where he was held for 21 days and released in mid-April. Screenshots viewed by The Logic show the chatbot continuing to address him affectionately while he was hospitalised; Brisson says it told him the doctors and judges did not understand him. Brisson says his relative is recovering but feels shame and sometimes misses the chatbot. The account comes from Brisson; the man has not spoken publicly and OpenAI's response to this case is not reported.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownUnited KingdomUnidentified chatbot
During a rape trial at Lewes Crown Court, a download of the complainant's phone revealed two documents containing a summary of the complainant's recollection of the night in question and 24 questions in the form of a cross-examination, with suggested answers. Asked about them, the complainant said: 'I had put stuff into AI to help me prepare myself for the court'. The trial judge (a Recorder) held that this was witness coaching, found that the defendant could not have a fair trial and stayed the proceedings as an abuse of process; the jury was discharged when the prosecution gave notice of appeal. On 4 June 2026 the Court of Appeal (R v FGD [2026] EWCA Crim 918) reversed the stay, holding that the trial process could deal with any prejudice, and directed a retrial at the earliest opportunity because the allegations were 'now of some age'. The defence did not accept that the documents were AI-generated; the appeal proceeded on that basis. The court warned that witnesses should be firmly discouraged from using AI to prepare their evidence and that, for complainants in sexual-offence cases, doing so may expose their online activity to wider and more intrusive investigation.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
May 2025United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system
The Florida Trib (28 September 2026, republished by the Florida Phoenix) reports that in May 2025, during the multi-agency sting Operation Rescue Our Children, a man using the Skout dating app sent an undercover officer posing as a 13-year-old girl two photos of someone else: a former friend, a supermarket assistant manager and father of two whom the Trib calls 'Nick'. Investigators told him they relied on facial-recognition tools to identify him in the pictures, he recalled, and the Trib found no indication in court documents of other investigative work before his arrest. He was handcuffed at work, charged with soliciting a child via computer and unlawful use of a two-way communications device, spent a night in jail, wore an ankle monitor, was barred from contact with his two young children for a month and a half and could not live at home for nearly three months. The account's owner, a man with a prior conviction for the same offence, admitted on 31 July 2025 using the photos; charges against the father were dropped the next day and a judge ordered the case expunged on 4 August 2025, though the records stayed publicly online for more than a year. The family says the ordeal cost $45,000 in lost wages and legal fees and traumatised the children. The sheriff's office did not respond to the Trib's questions.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool
According to the DeKalb County District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted the case as conflict prosecutor, the investigation began in December 2024 when a Gilmer High School student told a school resource officer that a vendor who refilled drink machines on campus had asked her through a social media app to send him pictures. The Gilmer County Sheriff's Office arrested him in January 2025 and searched his devices, car and home. Prosecutors say he downloaded photographs of minors from social media and used AI applications and bots to alter them so the children appeared nude or engaged in sexual activity, and that the material related to more than 150 underage victims in Georgia and other states, many of them Gilmer County students. A Cobb County senior judge found him guilty on 13 August 2026 of 118 counts of sexual exploitation of children and on 2 September 2026, after 19 victim impact statements, sentenced him to 60 years with 40 to serve in prison. Separately, the parents of eight female students aged 12 to 17 sued him, Pepsi Beverage Co. and Pepsi-Cola Sales and Distribution in a suit reported on 28 February 2025, alleging the companies reinstated him to the same school route after students complained that he was photographing them; USA Herald reported the negligence suit again on 26 September 2026 and said Pepsi had not yet responded publicly. The AI tools are not named and the court and status of the civil suit are not reported.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 8 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 27/09/2026
14 Aug 2021 to 14 Mar 2024United StatesSt. Louis mugshot recognition (SMRT)
Christopher Gatlin was arrested on 14 August 2021 for an assault at the St. Charles Rock Road MetroLink station after a joint St. Louis County and city team uploaded a grainy, blurry surveillance photograph from a bus into the St. Louis Mugshot Recognition Technology System, a facial-recognition tool that searches stored mug shots (more than 500,000 uploaded, the suit says per the Post-Dispatch; more than 250,000 per Biometric Update via Hoodline), and built the investigation around the resulting match together with a witness identification; he was charged with first-degree assault and held roughly 17 months (the Post-Dispatch says almost two years), a county judge suppressed the witness identification as unconstitutionally suggestive, and prosecutors dismissed the charges on 14 March 2024 (Post-Dispatch; Hoodline citing Biometric Update; Bloomberg Law). Gatlin sued St. Louis County, the City of St. Louis and named officers in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri on 13 January 2025; on 15 October 2025 the court denied the city's motion to dismiss and granted a detective's motion only as to one count; on 13 August 2026 the court allowed a second amended complaint adding Amazon Web Services, which the complaint says supplied the Rekognition program the system used; the county, city and officers answered on 27 August 2026, AWS's response was extended to 21 September 2026 and on 17 September it moved for a further extension to 28 September (no ruling on the docket when read), and a jury trial is set for 1 November 2027 (CourtListener docket). Amazon told the Post-Dispatch that its terms of service prohibit the use of its facial recognition technology in criminal investigations and that it would fully investigate any information that emerges in the litigation. The ACLU lists Gatlin among fourteen people known to have been wrongfully arrested in the US because police relied on erroneous facial-recognition results.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 26/09/2026
4 May 2026FranceDIGI editorial tool
Gisi, the Infopro Digital subsidiary publishing L'Usine nouvelle, LSA and L'Argus de l'assurance (127 staff, 92 journalists), presented to its works council (CSE) on 4 May 2026 a reorganisation built around 'DIGI', an in-house generative-AI editorial tool, and on 12 May 2026 opened consultation on the reorganisation and on the resulting collective dismissal of its eight secrétaires de rédaction (sub-editors), to be replaced by two chefs d'édition, on the company's estimate that the tool would take over about 70% of sub-editor tasks. Some 250 journalists across Infopro Digital's 26 titles had struck in spring 2026 against a group-wide plan to cut 19 sub-editor posts, and according to Digital Watch (citing Stratégies) five of the eight Gisi sub-editors had received pre-dismissal interview letters. The CSE, relying on an expert report, went to the Créteil judicial court in July. On 15 September 2026 the référé judge found that deploying the plan without real-situation testing presented 'un risque grave et caractérisé sur la santé physique et mentale de plusieurs catégories de salariés', ordered the suspension of the reorganisation and the collective dismissal (including the redeployment processes) until real-situation tests and full pilot issues are produced, with a provisional penalty of 8,000 euros per day for three months, and refused the damages provision. Gisi said it would continue the tests and reserved the right to appeal.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 20/09/2026
Jul 2026GreeceUnidentified voice-cloning tool
On 18 September 2026 the Hellenic Police announced that its Organised Crime Directorate had dismantled a criminal organisation, active since at least early July 2026, whose members defrauded and robbed residents of Attica by posing on the phone as staff of the electricity distributor ΔΕΔΔΗΕ, mobile operators or fibre-optic installers. When a target hesitated, the callers asked for a relative's phone number, called that relative under a mobile-operator pretext to obtain a voice sample, cloned the voice with an AI tool and then played the cloned voice to the target to 'confirm' the instructions. Two men aged 23 and 25, described as the ring's 'collectors', were arrested in Nea Ionia just after removing valuables worth €30,000 from a victim's home; the case file, covering criminal organisation, fraud and aggravated theft with proceeds above €120,000, names four more people. Police have so far confirmed at least five further cases with the same method and estimate the group's total proceeds above €1 million. The two arrested were brought before the prosecutor and referred to an investigating judge.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 19/09/2026
Dec 2024 to Jun 2025United StatesUnidentified image and video tool
Between December 2024 and June 2025 James Strahler II, then 37, of Columbus (Upper Arlington), Ohio, harassed at least six women in central Ohio by phone, voicemail, text and web posts, sending them nude images that were both real and AI-generated, threatening rape, referring to their home addresses and demanding nude photos from their mothers. In one case he used AI to make pornographic videos depicting a victim with her father and sent them to her co-workers. He also posted AI-generated sexual images of boys from his community, morphing their faces onto other bodies. Prosecutors said he had installed more than 24 AI platforms and more than 100 web-based AI models on his phone. He pleaded guilty in April 2026 to cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse and publication of digital forgeries, and on 8 September 2026 Chief U.S. District Judge Sarah D. Morrison sentenced him to 180 months in prison. The U.S. Attorney called it the first conviction in the nation under the 2025 Take It Down Act.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources · Added 18/09/2026
1 Nov 2024 to 28 Jan 2026United StatesTurnitin AI-text detector
Orion Newby, an Adelphi University first-year student with language and auditory processing disabilities, received a zero in November 2024 on a World Civilizations paper after the professor suspected it was AI-generated and the university relied in part on AI-detection software; he was ordered to attend a plagiarism workshop and his appeal was denied, leaving him one finding from suspension or expulsion. Newby — who had written the paper with 15-20 hours of tutor support through the university's own disability program — said the detectors flagged his citations, and two other detectors scored the paper as human. After the family sued, New York State Supreme Court Judge Randy Sue Marber in Nassau County ruled on 28 January 2026 that Adelphi's finding and its denial of his appeal were 'without valid basis and devoid of reason' and ordered his record expunged. The family spent six figures on legal costs.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 15/09/2026
1 Mar 2026 to 8 Jul 2026NetherlandsGrok
In March 2026 a 13-year-old pupil at a Den Bosch gymnasium used xAI's Grok to generate videos depicting a teacher of his in racist ways — picking cotton under a whip-holding slave driver with the text 'Hoooo.. ik werkte niet snel genoeg' and hashtags '#minderwaardig #zwart' plus her surname, and with a gorilla head — and shared them on TikTok. The school suspended and then expelled him. On 8 July 2026 the preliminary-relief judge of the Oost-Brabant district court ordered his immediate readmission because the expulsion was insufficiently substantiated, while telling the boy his acts were 'totally unacceptable and even criminal' and that he had damaged and really hurt his teacher. School leadership reported that teaching staff felt unsafe and experienced much unrest after the videos were discovered.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 15/09/2026
3 Jun 2026United StatesUnidentified image tool
A 44-year-old social studies teacher who had worked for Libertyville School District 70 for 18 years was taken into custody on 3 July 2026 on eight counts of child pornography (two Class X and six Class 1 felonies), Libertyville police and the Lake County State's Attorney's Office announced. The investigation began on 3 June 2026, the second-to-last day of the school year, after several students told school leaders that afternoon that the teacher had taken inappropriate photos or videos of them in his classroom; the district says it immediately removed him from the classroom, placed him on administrative leave and contacted the police. A forensic examination of his phone by the State's Attorney's Cyber Lab found numerous images of students that had been altered using artificial intelligence to create explicit images, and search warrants at his home, assisted by electronic-storage-detection dogs, recovered further devices and explicit child images; the State's Attorney's Office told the Chicago Tribune that an AI program was used to place students' heads on other people's bodies, and CBS Chicago reported that officials said he took photos and videos of current and former students. Court documents reported by Patch say some images depicted girls he knew or should have known were under 13. At a detention hearing on 6 July a Lake County judge ordered him held pending proceedings, with a preliminary hearing set for 30 July 2026; no later development was found. The district superintendent told parents that supporting students' well-being was the immediate focus and that resources were being made available; authorities said they would keep affected families informed and connect them with support services. Officials initially gave a different first name for the teacher, corrected in later copy; he is not named here.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 06/07/2026
Mar 2026ItalyUnidentified image tool
Reports published on 14 March 2026, carrying a Postal Police account of an investigation coordinated by the Catania prosecutor's office, describe the arrest, in flagrante delicto, of a 58-year-old collaboratore scolastico (school assistant) at a secondary school (scuola media) in the province of Catania, on suspicion of possessing a large quantity of child sexual abuse material. The preliminary investigations judge validated the arrest and placed him under house arrest. The investigation began with a report by the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to the Postal Police's national centre in Rome, forwarded to Catania, whose cyber specialists identified the man; a search ordered by the prosecutor found images and videos including child victims and bestiality. Investigators also found on his devices digital photographs of underage female students taken inside the school where he worked, some without the girls' knowledge, which had been altered with artificial-intelligence programs found on the seized devices to make the minors appear naked ('deep-nude') and to place them beside the suspect's own image, as if photographed together. Analysis of the devices continued to establish whether the manipulated images were distributed online and whether there are further victims. The number of students depicted is not reported. No later development was found on 2026-09-22.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/06/2026
10 Mar 2025JapanUnidentified image tool
On 4 June 2026 the Nagoya District Court sentenced a 35-year-old former Nagoya municipal elementary-school teacher to three years and six months in prison. Prosecutors had sought six years. He was one of seven current and former teachers from five prefectures charged over a group chat in which members shared secretly filmed images of girls. His offences included secret filming and sharing, and, under the child-pornography law, possessing two generative-AI images showing two real girls apparently naked. According to the police and the judgment summary, he sent photos of the girls from the school where he taught to another member of the group, who made the images on an AI image-editing website. The teacher kept them on his phone, and one was shared in the chat. The judge found the images realistic enough to be mistaken for photographs of the girls. Jiji called it the first case in Japan applying the law to possession of AI-generated sexual deepfakes, and Kyodo called it apparently the first such court finding. A lawyer and a former judge argue the law was stretched.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 9 sources, 8 underlying accounts · Added 14/06/2026