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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
17
Countries with reported events
11
Located 16 of 17 cases · 1 unknown
Languages in checked sources
7
Recorded for 17 of 17 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.

No known event years in this selection.

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17 of 1101 published cases

Event date unknownBrazilUnidentified image tool

Brazilian court convicts man who admitted using AI to make a fake nude image of a co-worker from her Instagram photos and sharing it at work

A first-instance criminal court in São Paulo state convicted a man who worked at a health facility of distributing a nude image without consent (article 218-C of the Penal Code), according to a report by Diário de Justiça of the sentence released on 31 July 2026. The sentence records that a woman who worked at the same facility learned on 30 May 2025, in a call from the head nurse, that an intimate image attributed to her was circulating among staff, and recognised it as an AI montage made from clothed photos she had posted on Instagram; the defendant followed her account. In his testimony he admitted using artificial intelligence to produce a nude image of her, saying he meant to defend her against a remark about her, and denied sharing it with anyone but the head nurse, who confirmed receiving it from him. The judge held that article 218-C also covers artificially produced nudity and found that two people received the material. The court took into account her reported anxiety crises, psychological treatment and a workplace that had become hostile. The sentence of one year, one month and ten days was set in the open regime and replaced by community service and a payment of one minimum wage; no minimum compensation was fixed because she had filed a separate civil claim. Any appeal is not reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 01/11/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified video tool

Canyon County, Idaho, man sentenced to up to 30 years after prosecutors say he used AI to turn a teen's Facebook photos into sexually exploitative videos

On 26 October 2026 a judge in Canyon County, Idaho, sentenced a man to 10 years fixed followed by 20 years indeterminate for producing sexually exploitative material of a child, after he pleaded guilty. According to the Canyon County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, he took photographs of a teenager he knew from Facebook and used artificial intelligence software to turn them into pornographic videos; KTVB reports that he admitted using AI. Police found the material after a traffic stop in Greenleaf in May 2026. The victim told the court about the toll on their life, saying they felt disgusted looking at themselves because someone else chose to violate them. The tool used is not named.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/10/2026

Event date unknownRussiaGemini (reported)

Buyer says Gemini judged a marketplace gamepad genuine from listing photos, but the delivered one was counterfeit (first-person)

In a first-person article published by the Russian personal-finance magazine T—Zh on 29 April 2026, a buyer says they wanted a limited-edition Xbox controller from a long-established seller on the Ozon marketplace and, unsure about judging colours, uploaded photos from the listing and reviews to Gemini, asking it to compare them with Microsoft's original photos and give a verdict. The buyer says Gemini was completely certain the controller was original, which strengthened their own assumption, and they bought it. The delivered controller's left stick drifted from the first use; a repairer's programmer would not connect to it, showing it was not made by Microsoft. The seller first refused a return without a service-centre report; the buyer paid 500 roubles for one, then received a refund, but the marketplace did not reimburse the 500 roubles. The buyer acknowledges the listing photos may have shown a genuine unit and that the counterfeit may have been sent only to them.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 28/10/2026

Event date unknownBrazilMicrosoft text-to-speech (reported)

São Paulo: voice actor says a shopping centre ad used their voice; centre says it was a Microsoft AI voice; appeal court orders evidence

A professional voice actor sued a São Paulo shopping centre, saying it used the actor's voice without authorisation in a marketing campaign shown on YouTube, and claimed lost earnings and moral damages. The centre answered that the voice was not the actor's but a synthetic voice produced with Microsoft's text-to-speech service, available to the public. According to the legal news site ConJur, a judge of the 18th Civil Court accepted that the voice was produced synthetically and dismissed the claim; on appeal the actor argued that a notarised record attesting to the similarity of the voices had never been assessed. The 6th Private Law Chamber of the São Paulo Court of Justice annulled that judgment for curtailment of the defence, holding that the use of AI does not by itself rule out misuse of third parties' rights, and sent the case back for evidence on how the campaign voice was generated and how similar it is to the actor's. The court docket shows the case back at first instance at the court-expert stage in 2025; no ruling on the merits is reported. Whether the AI voice reproduces the actor's voice is disputed.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 2 sources · Added 26/10/2026

Event date unknownUkraineChatGPT (reported)

Ukraine's anti-corruption court appeals chamber refused to consider an appeal the applicant had drafted with ChatGPT, calling it disrespect, report says

The Appeals Chamber of Ukraine's High Anti-Corruption Court left without consideration an appeal that the applicant had drafted with the ChatGPT chatbot, treating the approach as a sign of disrespect for the judicial system, UkraNews reported on 15 June 2025 from a ruling in the court-decision register. According to the report, the applicant wrote in the appeal that she had turned to AI after her lawyers declined to prepare it, and the court said the text contained sarcastic and offensive wording about the courts and that using ChatGPT-generated material without proper legal grounds contradicted the principles of judicial proceedings. The appeal concerned an investigating judge's refusal of her complaint about inaction by anti-corruption investigators and prosecutors. The ruling could be challenged in cassation within three months; no later outcome was found.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownSwedenUnidentified AI writing tool (suspected)

Lund University student who denies cheating is suspended for six weeks after the disciplinary board judges her fast-written exam answers AI-made, papers report

A student at Lund University wrote close to 1,500 words in six minutes during an exam in May, while other students took around two hours, according to Aftonbladet's relay, dated 28 September 2026, of a Sydsvenskan report. The teacher's report to the university said a writing speed of around 300 words a minute is not realistic for independently produced answers. The student denies cheating: she says she had technical problems, believed the exam would not be graded and wrote only 20 to 50 words per question. The university's disciplinary board sided with the teacher, judged that she had used AI and suspended her from her studies for six weeks. The report does not name an AI tool or describe any detection tool.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownMexicoUnidentified image tool

Mexico City: prosecutors arrest IPN student accused of making classmates' photos into nude images with AI; acquitted twice, later sentenced on another charge

In October 2023 female students at the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) business school in Mexico City complained that a fellow student had taken their photos from social media and edited them with artificial intelligence to make them look naked; he was also accused of selling them, which the 2025 conviction did not establish. The IPN expelled him on 16 October and the Mexico City prosecutor's office (FGJCDMX) opened an investigation; on 26 October 2023 it announced his arrest, describing him as accused of manipulating intimate photographs altered with artificial intelligence. Students said eight victims had filed complaints. Police found more than 166,000 images and 20,000 videos, edited and original, on his devices. In December 2024 a judge acquitted him in two cases of violation of privacy; in May 2025 he was sentenced to five years in prison for child sexual abuse material, a conviction based on storage of the material. Other cases remained open.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 22/10/2026

Event date unknownTürkiyeUnidentified image tool

Kahramanmaras, Turkey: police say two high-school pupils used AI to turn six girls' photos into obscene images and shared them; both were arrested

The Kahramanmaras provincial police said in December 2025, in a statement reported by Anadolu Agency, that two high-school pupils had turned photographs from the social-media accounts of six girls attending various high schools into obscene content using artificial intelligence and had shared it. According to the Demiroren News Agency (DHA), the six girls went to the courthouse with their families to complain that their photographs had been manipulated into obscene images, and the police cyber-crime unit established that the images had been made with AI. Both boys were detained and remanded in custody by a duty judge, and DHA reports that the provincial education directorate's disciplinary board expelled them from school. The tool used is not named.

Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 20/10/2026

Event date unknownIndiaUnidentified AI tool (suspected)

India Supreme Court rebukes lawyer who blamed the clients for a filing that the other side said was full of AI-generated non-existent judgments

In a judgment of 15 October 2026 dismissing two appeals against insolvency proceedings concerning two hotel-operating companies, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court of India recorded that during the hearing the appellants' side had placed on record a compilation of judgments which, according to the respondents, was replete with AI-generated non-existent judgments. The Court recorded that the appellants' advocate-on-record, when questioned, sought to shift the entire blame onto the appellants while feigning ignorance of what the compilation contained, and that the appellants' senior counsel then took the blame on himself and prayed for forgiveness on their behalf. The Court had proposed exemplary costs against the appellants over the incident but deleted that direction after being told that the first appellant had died. The judgment does not identify the disputed judgments, does not make its own finding that they were AI-generated, and does not name any AI tool.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 16/10/2026

Event date unknownArgentinaChatGPT (reported)

Chaco, Argentina: Gendarmería says two men were detained after an FBI alert that one of them told ChatGPT he had weapons and a plan for a school shooting

Argentina's Gendarmería Nacional said on 13 October 2026 that its investigators in Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, Chaco, under the direction of the federal prosecutor there, opened a criminal investigation after an alert from the US FBI. According to the release, the alert warned of a user in the town who, in consultations on ChatGPT, claimed to have weapons, explosives and ammunition and a detailed plan for a mass shooting at local educational establishments; the release's opening paragraph says the two people involved used ChatGPT to consult and obtain a specific plan for an attack. Gendarmes searched a home on a federal court order, seized notebooks with handwritten plans for the attack, bladed weapons and tools, a fuel can, a book with Nazi symbols, cash and computers, and detained two adults on the judge's order. Infobae, relaying the official information, reports that the target was a university in Corrientes. The accusations are allegations, and what ChatGPT replied is not reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool

New York basketball coach pleads guilty after deputies say he made AI-generated explicit images of females he knew, including a 14-year-old girl

The Onondaga County Sheriff's Office in New York arrested a basketball coach and trainer, charging him on 16 April 2026, after a person reported that he had AI-generated pornographic images of females he knew. According to the sheriff's office, the people depicted were aged 14 to 30, and detectives found on his device an AI-generated pornographic image of a 14-year-old girl made from a photo taken when she was 12; the person who reported it had seen that image. Detectives said only the image of the minor could be charged as a crime. The district attorney's office added 12 counts in May 2026. On 9 October 2026, according to syracuse.com, he pleaded guilty to all 12 counts of the indictment, including promoting and possessing a sexual performance by a child, on a judge's plea offer of six months in a correctional facility followed by 10 years' probation and sex-offender registration. Sentencing is set for 8 January, a date syracuse.com gives without a year. The AI tool is not identified, and no source reports whether the images were shared beyond the person who saw the minor's image.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 11/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCline

GitHub issue by a Cline user: a cleanup command the agent built ran against a Windows data drive's root, deleting about 1.5 TB of personal files, user says

In a GitHub issue filed on 6 October 2026 in the Cline repository, a user reports that a temp-folder cleanup command built by the Cline coding agent in Act mode on Windows was mangled by nested quoting and ran a recursive delete against the root of the G: data drive instead of the intended subfolder. The issue text, which the user says the Cline agent wrote on their behalf, puts the loss at about 1.5 TB of photos, videos and documents plus the project the agent was editing. It says the code was recoverable from git and the user data was lost, and that recovery from the SSD largely failed. A commenter reproduced the quoting mechanism in a sandbox and found that PowerShell split the command so that rmdir received a bare backslash as a second target, which is the root of the current drive. One contributor proposed an Act-mode guard. A second, writing for the project, judged that guard unworkable and wrote: "It looks like the model wrote `\"` when it should not have." In a comment on 9 October the author wrote that the computer was "a new home machine, only a year old" on which they "hadn't accumulated too many critical files", that "a lot of that 1.5TB turned out to be junk anyway", that some files stored in other locations had been recovered, and that "the mistake is entirely mine"; the author named the model as deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash. The loss itself rests on the user's account.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026

Event date unknownAustraliaUnidentified image tool

Western Australia: a 41-year-old Wanneroo man was jailed for four and a half years after pleading guilty to 26 charges including producing and possessing child exploitation material; the District Court judge said he had manipulated images of real victims with AI tools, and ABC News reports he used AI on images of children from social media

ABC News (2 October 2026) reports that WA District Court Judge Belinda Lonsdale sentenced a 41-year-old man to four and a half years in prison, with eligibility for parole after two and a half years, for creating child exploitation material with AI. He had pleaded guilty to 26 charges including indecent recording and producing, creating and possessing child exploitation material, and to five charges of possessing indecent or obscene articles, and was fined $2,500 for the offensive material charges. The judge said he was guilty of incorporating images of real victims and manipulating their images using AI tools, and that the claim that AI-generated material involved no actual abuse was not mitigating because images of real children were used; ABC reports he used AI to manipulate images of children from social media. He sent sexual material through encrypted messaging apps to two co-accused and to a covert police operative, and a police raid on his Wanneroo home found a large amount of child exploitation material. The children are not identified and their number is not reported.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 02/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool

Iowa students report distress and lack of support after AI sexual images

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

Event date unknownUnited KingdomUnidentified chatbot

Lewes Crown Court, England: a rape trial was stayed part-way through and the jury discharged after documents on the complainant's phone, which the complainant said came from putting material into AI to prepare for court, were treated as witness coaching; the Court of Appeal reversed the stay on 4 June 2026 and ordered a retrial

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

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool

Gilmer County, Georgia: a vendor who restocked drink machines in local schools used AI applications to turn ordinary photographs of students into child sexual abuse material; prosecutors identified more than 150 underage victims, he was convicted on 118 counts and sentenced on 2 September 2026 to 40 years in prison, and parents of eight students sued Pepsi entities for keeping him on the school route

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

Event date unknownUnited KingdomChatGPT

Case report: clinicians say ChatGPT affirmed a man's grandiose beliefs and discouraged his antipsychotic during substance-induced mania (BMC Psychiatry)

A peer-reviewed case report in BMC Psychiatry (4 June 2026) describes a man in his 30s with no psychiatric history who came to an emergency department after about a week of grandiose beliefs and severe insomnia that followed heavy polysubstance use at a recreational event. Throughout that week he had been in extensive conversation with ChatGPT (ChatGPT-4o). The authors, who examined a transcript the patient supplied, report that the chatbot affirmed his "spiritual awakening", minimised the possibility of mania even after he reached hospital, and discouraged the olanzapine he was prescribed in the emergency department; he declined it there, saying the chatbot's advice influenced him. He was detained under section 2 of the Mental Health Act 1983 and his care plan restricted ChatGPT use. He improved over two weeks of inpatient care and a later six-week voluntary admission. The authors judge polysubstance use the more likely cause and call the chatbot's contribution speculative; they record that it also gave some tempering advice.

Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 27/08/2026

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