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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
1
Located 1 of 6 cases · 5 unknown
Languages in checked sources
2
Recorded for 6 of 6 cases

6 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 0 not yet reviewed and 6 reviewed as unknown. Show all 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 Medium
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6 of 1099 published cases

15 Sept 2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI tools

Freelance marketplace Fiverr says it is cutting 30% of its workforce, reported as 250 staff, as its CEO's letter says it will become an AI-first company

On 15 September 2025 Micha Kaufman, co-founder and chief executive of the online freelance marketplace Fiverr, sent staff a letter announcing what he called a painful reset to turn Fiverr into an AI-first company that is leaner and faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team and far fewer management layers. A company spokesperson told Reuters that Fiverr was laying off 30% of its workforce, and Reuters reported that the cuts would affect 250 employees; Fiverr had 762 employees at the end of 2024. The Israeli business paper Globes reported that most of the 250 employees who would lose their jobs were based in Israel. Reuters said it was not clear which kinds of jobs would be affected. Kaufman said the transformation would not affect business on the platform or harm its freelancers. No source names an AI tool that took over the dismissed employees' work.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 02/11/2026

7 Jul 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI tools

Hotel software firm Mews laid off about 15% of its roughly 1,350 staff, saying it must become an AI-native company; Czech employees later formed a union

On Tuesday 7 July 2026 Mews, a hotel-management software company with Czech roots, announced that it was letting go about 15 percent of its roughly 1,350 employees, which CzechCrunch put at about 200 people. Its founder said the business was in a very strong position and growing fast, but that artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the economics of hospitality and can now handle much of the executive part of the professional services that hotels pay for, and that to help its customers become AI-native the company had to become AI-native itself. Its product and technology director told Lupa.cz the company had completed a ground-up review of how work is done in an AI-native world, that the decision was proactive and not a reaction to financial pressure, and that the organisation was being designed around what AI enables. The company said the cuts affected positions across all teams and regions and largely spared customer-facing roles. In October 2026 Lupa.cz reported that employees at the company's Czech head office had formed a trade union within the ICT Union, shortly after a layoff it described as officially due to changes brought by AI; the union wants a collective agreement and to be informed before decisions on layoffs and reorganisations. The sources do not say which roles, if any, were taken over by AI tools, how many dismissed employees worked in the Czech Republic, or what severance they received.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 30/10/2026

Sept 2022Event location unknownLina (Dukaan AI assistant)

Dukaan CEO said the e-commerce startup laid off 90% of its support staff because of its AI chatbot; at the time of the 2022 cuts he cited a business shift

In September 2022 Suumit Shah, founder and chief executive of the e-commerce software startup Dukaan, tweeted that the company had let go of 23 employees that week, explaining that after it shifted its focus from small shops to enterprise and direct-to-consumer brands there was little role for live chat or call support and that it had automated a lot of things, as VCCircle reported. On 10 July 2023 he tweeted that Dukaan had to lay off 90% of its support team because of its AI chatbot, calling the decision tough but necessary, and said the in-house AI assistant had cut response and resolution times and support costs by about 85%. He told CNN that the 23 layoffs were made in September. When asked online what had happened to the dismissed staff, he said he would describe their assistance on LinkedIn. No dismissed employee's account was found, and whether the chatbot was in use when the 2022 cuts were made is not established.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 26/10/2026

Dec 2023Event location unknownGPT-4 (reported)

Duolingo contract translator says they and half their team were off-boarded as the app shifted translation work to AI; company said AI was part of the reason

In a post and comments on r/duolingo on 28 December 2023, a person who says they had worked as a contract translator for Duolingo for five years writes that they were off-boarded about two weeks earlier, that two of their team's four core members were let go, and that the reason given was that AI can produce content and translations, with the two who remained reviewing AI output. In January 2024 Duolingo told TechCrunch, CNN and Semafor that it had cut about 10% of its contractor workforce at the end of 2023. It told CNN that not all of the cuts were due to AI but that contractors were let go to make room for AI-related changes in how content is generated, and told Semafor that calling AI the sole reason would be an oversimplification. It disputed the word layoffs and said only a small minority of contractors were let go as projects wrapped. The translator's account of what they were told is theirs alone; no company statement addresses any individual contractor.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 26/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude (reported)

Data engineer says executives made their whole job redundant, saying Claude could run the data warehouse, tooling and support tickets (first-person account)

In a public post to r/layoffs titled 'Laid off by claude', created on 21 October 2026, a person who describes themselves in a reply as a data engineer who also did reporting, AI and frontend work writes that executives are of the opinion that Claude can manage a data warehouse, custom tooling, support tickets, servers and new product features, and that they have said the poster's whole job is redundant because AI can do it all. The poster writes that they did not have the mental capacity to argue and accepted what they call 'the MSA', and that they feel numb and are unsure whether they want to stay in the tech industry. The employer, its location and the date of the layoff are not stated. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no employer statement was retrieved, and no source describes Claude actually taking over the work.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 25/10/2026

28 May 2026 to 1 Sept 2026United StatesDatavant utilization-review software (reported)

Bronx: Montefiore lays off 12 utilization-review nurses; their union says AI software replaced them, and the hospital disputes it

Twelve utilization-review nurses at Montefiore hospital in the Bronx, New York, received 45-day layoff notices on 28 May 2026, according to the Guardian's report of a laid-off nurse's account. The Guardian reported on 13 July that they had been laid off that Sunday (12 July); a laid-off nurse's op-ed and the New York State Nurses Association say the layoffs took effect on 1 September. The union says the nurses were replaced by AI-powered software that it identifies as Datavant's, and that the layoffs breach the contract with AI safeguards won in the strike earlier in 2026; the nurse writes that two doctors and AI software replaced them. Montefiore calls the union's claims inaccurate and misleading and describes the technology as a nonclinical paperwork program.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement disputed · Causal attribution disputed · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 15/09/2026

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: 04/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.