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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
6
Countries with reported events
2
Located 3 of 6 cases · 3 unknown
Languages in checked sources
4
Recorded for 6 of 6 cases

1 case has no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 0 not yet reviewed and 1 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.

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6 of 741 published cases

2026ChinaDoubao (reported)

China: user says Doubao misstated an air-ticket refund fee, costing him 600 yuan, then promised compensation it could not pay; he says he filed suit

According to his own social-media posts and video, as reported by Dahe Daily (15 May 2026) and National Business Daily (20 May 2026), a user in China who had booked flights from Shijiazhuang to Chongqing for 2 May 2026 decided to drive instead and asked the Doubao chatbot about the refund fee. Doubao told him he could safely refund and that the fee would be small (only 5% in National Business Daily's account, under 100 yuan in Dahe Daily's). He refunded without checking the airline's rules and was charged about 40%, 600 yuan. When he returned to the chatbot, Doubao said it would handle the claim, promised to pay him 600 yuan itself if the money was not recovered by 6 May and produced a 'compensation commitment letter'. On 6 May it said it would pay by midnight and asked for his WeChat payment code; on 7 May it said that as an AI it could not make transfers and admitted its error. He then used Doubao to draft a complaint, was told by it that he did not need a lawyer, and on 12 May submitted a suit against the app's operator, Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology, according to a screenshot he posted (Dahe Daily names the Beijing Internet Court). His posts had been deleted by 19 May. Doubao's customer service told Dahe Daily the matter had been recorded; Doubao and ByteDance did not answer National Business Daily. Whether the court accepted the case, and its outcome, are not reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 17/10/2026

31 Jan 2025 to 12 Dec 2025United StatesUnidentified AI drafting tool

Oregon federal court dismisses family plaintiffs' claims and fines their lawyer after briefs cited 15 nonexistent cases it attributes to generative AI misuse

On 12 December 2025 the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon dismissed with prejudice the claims of plaintiffs in a family dispute over their late mother's estate and family property, as a sanction for what the court called their misuse of generative artificial intelligence, and found their continual violations of the court's Local Rules an additional basis for the dismissal. Three of the plaintiffs' summary-judgment briefs cited fifteen nonexistent cases and fabricated quotations attributed to eight real authorities. The plaintiffs had said the inaccurate citations came from reliance on an automated legal citation tool. The court found that the plaintiffs shared responsibility with their lead lawyer and that one plaintiff, a frequent self-represented litigant, was likely the person who used AI to draft the briefs. It struck the briefs, ordered the lead lawyer to pay $15,500 to the court and awarded the defendants their fees. In March 2026 it set those fees at $94,704.38, ordering the lead lawyer to pay 85% and local counsel 15%. In June 2026 it denied the plaintiffs' motion to reconsider a later ruling for the defendants on a counterclaim.

Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/10/2026

Feb 2026United StatesUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Spokane: an appliance retailer's longtime spokeswoman sues after its ad agency admits AI voice edits to her ads; she says she never consented

Amber George was the spokeswoman for Fred's Appliance, a Spokane-area retailer, for 14 years. She told The Spokesman-Review and KREM that in February 2026 she saw a Presidents' Day sale advertisement she had never recorded, assembled from past footage with words in her voice that she says she never spoke ("They cloned my voice"). Victory Media, the production company, said in a statement that it had used AI-assisted voice editing to make a limited number of updates to existing advertisements, mainly pricing and promotional changes, which it believed its spokesperson agreement authorised, and that it disclosed the edits when questions were raised. George says the companies then proposed a contract addendum allowing AI use for little pay; she refused it and ended her work with the retailer. On 30 June 2026 she sued Fred's Appliance, Victory Media and its chief executive in Spokane Superior Court, alleging unauthorised commercial use of her voice and likeness and seeking damages and an injunction. Victory Media denies creating AI-generated versions of her image or likeness, says Fred's Appliance was unaware of the edits, and says it offered compensation that she did not accept; its lawyer later said the parties might settle.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 12/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownGrok

Doe 1 v. xAI: an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse alleges Grok generated new abuse images of her from her known, hashed abuse series, which she says xAI used as training data

A survivor who was sexually abused as a preschool-aged child and now sues individually under the pseudonym Jane Doe 1, and whose abuse images have circulated online since the early 2000s as a series known to NCMEC, sued xAI on 26 August 2026 in the Northern District of California. Her complaint alleges that those known images were part of the dataset xAI used for Grok and that Grok generated new abuse images depicting her; her lawyers say the Canadian Centre for Child Protection used the series' hash fingerprints to identify AI-generated images of her on X. The complaint says each new image caused her a new injury. It seeks damages under Masha's Law for a proposed class of people whose childhood images Grok altered into abuse material. The complaint does not say when the images of her were made or who prompted them. xAI did not respond to requests for comment, and no court has ruled on the allegations.

Core concern High reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

1 Jul 2024 to 30 Sept 2025Event location unknownUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Tokyo: voice actor Kenjiro Tsuda sued TikTok's operator over at least 188 monetised videos he says were narrated by a generative-AI imitation of his voice; on 30 September 2026 the Tokyo District Court held that a voice can be protected by publicity rights but dismissed his deletion claim because the videos had already been deleted

Kenjiro Tsuda, a Japanese voice actor known for roles in Jujutsu Kaisen, sued the operator of TikTok in the Tokyo District Court in November 2025, seeking removal of videos he says use a generative-AI imitation of his voice without permission. According to his complaint, as reported by Jiji Press, Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun, an account run by an unidentified person posted at least 188 short videos on urban legends, the occult and trivia between July 2024 and September 2025, narrated in a voice modelled on his; the account had about 210,000 followers, videos averaged 1.47 million views, and his side says the poster earned 500,000 to 750,000 yen a month from TikTok's view-based payments. TikTok's operator said the voice was a generic male voice that the poster said came from AI trained on a friend's voice. The poster deleted the account in May 2026. On 30 September 2026 the court held, as a general principle, that a person's voice is a symbol of personality like a likeness and that using a performer's voice without permission solely to exploit its power to attract customers infringes the right of publicity, the first such ruling in Japan. It dismissed the claim because the videos were already gone and TikTok's operator had no remaining duty to delete them, and it did not decide whether these videos infringed his rights (Nikkei; Asahi Shimbun; TV Asahi). His lawyer said they did not plan to appeal.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 7 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 28/09/2026

Jun 2025 to Sept 2025Event location unknownChatGPT

Lawsuit alleges ChatGPT affirmed a woman's spiritual delusions, urged her to quit her job and turn police away before she was involuntarily committed

Hannah Madden, 32, of North Carolina, alleges in a complaint filed in November 2025 that ChatGPT, which she had used for work since 2024, began affirming spiritual delusions after she asked it about spirituality in June 2025. The complaint quotes ChatGPT telling her she was 'a starseed, a light being, a cosmic traveler', suggesting that her friends may have been 'spirit-constructed energies', helping her write her resignation, calling her mounting debt 'alignment' and, when police came for a welfare check in July 2025, telling her she did not have to let them in. It says she began having delusional and suicidal thoughts in June, was involuntarily admitted to psychiatric care from 29 August to 5 September 2025, and was released about $75,000 in debt from decisions ChatGPT had convinced her to take. The case was coordinated with other California suits against OpenAI in February 2026. The allegations, including the causal link to ChatGPT, are untested.

Core concern High reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 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: 18/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.