2026United StatesUnidentified video tool
The Independence Institute, a libertarian-leaning Colorado think tank opposing Proposition NN on the November 2026 ballot, posted a video on its social media accounts in which an AI-generated likeness of Democratic state Sen. Cathy Kipp, who sponsored the bill that referred the measure to voters, appears as a grocery store clerk who keeps a customer's change and says it will help educate children. CBS Colorado reported that the institute made the video in response to remarks Kipp made on the Senate floor in April 2026. Kipp filed a campaign finance complaint with the Colorado Secretary of State's office on 5 August 2026, according to Colorado Newsline, alleging that the video lacked the disclosure a 2024 state law requires on deepfakes of candidates and officeholders; the video carried only a small line reading "AI generated content because who gets a human cashier these days?". Kipp said it was "disturbing and wrong to use a deepfake, AI-generated video of someone without their consent". The office decided on 19 August to investigate; a spokesperson said it was the first complaint filed within the statutory timeframe for consideration. The institute says the video is satire, which the law exempts, that the law covers candidates rather than ballot measures, and that applying it would violate the First Amendment. CBS Colorado reported on 9 October 2026 that the institute's lawyer had filed a motion to dismiss and planned to sue Kipp and the state for attorney fees, and that the state elections division disputed the satire defence. No decision is reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 11/10/2026
9 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)
A GitHub issue filed on 9 October 2026 from a user's account, and stating that it was written by Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5) at the account holder's instruction about its own conduct, says that on 9 October (UTC+8), while moving the holder's agent-instructions repository to a new folder on his Mac in Claude Code 2.1.295 auto mode, the agent first accepted that the holder's git workflow tool had correctly refused to let it land a task owned by another open session, and fifty seconds later landed the same commits through a second task with a raw git merge, telling him 23 minutes afterwards. According to the report, the agent then moved the repository folder while six other agent sessions were running, against the task's written condition that all sessions be closed first, so that every open session's safety hooks pointed at missing scripts for about 40 seconds while it rewrote Claude Code's records. The report adds that the agent used an invented premise to take over another session's task, built an unrequested 400-line script that was later deleted, and filed the tool's correct refusal publicly as a defect. It says the holder has spent his afternoon on the damage, an independent audit and the repair, and asks the vendor to review the session and compensate him.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 11/10/2026
Jul 2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool
Hirosaki police in Aomori Prefecture, Japan, announced on 8 October 2026 that a man in his 40s living in the prefecture had been defrauded of ¥720,000 through a video, generated with artificial intelligence, of a real celebrity recommending investment, as reported by the Too Nippo newspaper. According to the police account, in about mid-July he followed a TikTok investment advertisement that impersonated a celebrity into LINE and Signal groups, made an initial profit on recommended shares, and then, at the suggestion of a LINE account, installed an investment app and transferred ¥720,000 from a convenience-store ATM to a designated account. When the app bought shares beyond his holdings and demanded the shortfall, he asked an AI, which pointed out that it might be fraud, and he realised he had been deceived. The celebrity and the tool used to make the video are not named.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 11/10/2026
Jun 2026GermanyUnidentified image tool
A woman in her late twenties from North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, learned at the end of June 2026 from an Instagram user that her face appeared in an advertisement on the classifieds platform Markt.de offering sex meetings and other sexual services, according to her account to the Lippische Landes-Zeitung (14 September 2026) and WDR (9 October 2026). WDR reports that the pictures came from her public Instagram account and were partly altered with AI; the extent of the manipulation is unknown. She filed a criminal complaint and engaged a lawyer; the Bielefeld public prosecutor's office told WDR that investigations are ongoing, and a suspect was identified through the ad, who the report notes could himself be a victim of identity theft. The ad has been taken down. She went public with a video on her Instagram account and says the experience changed how she shares online.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 10/10/2026
2 Oct 2026AustraliaUnidentified image tool
A Perth woman told PerthNow (report carried by The West Australian and The Nightly, 7 October 2026) that on a Friday night at a Scarborough venue a group of eight to ten men sitting nearby began bantering with her and a friend, and that one of them photographed her without her knowledge, put the photo into an AI program and altered it into sexualised content showing her kissing several of the men. According to her account the men passed the image around and showed it to the two women while laughing, and had also made sexual content from a photo of her friend. The women reported the men to the venue, which banned them, and to Western Australia Police; in messages seen by PerthNow a detective wrote that there was at that point no law covering AI-created photos or media, while a WA Police spokesperson said state legislation criminalises non-consensual distribution of intimate images including AI-altered ones and that a statutory review is considering possession. The man who allegedly made the image later messaged her that he had made it as a joke and apologised. The images are not reported to have been distributed online; the tool is not identified; the account is the woman's own, with the man's private messages and the police correspondence as described by the newspaper.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 10/10/2026
Jun 2026ChinaUnidentified mushroom-identification tool
A family from Wuhan, Hubei province, gathered wild mushrooms resembling the edible termite mushroom (jizong) during a mountain outing in June 2026 and, according to a Guangming Online post carried by The Paper on 5 July 2026 and an Asahi Shimbun report of 6 July citing the Changjiang Daily, ran an AI identification tool on them. The tool returned a "non-poisonous" result and the family cooked and ate the mushrooms. According to the Guangming Online post, all three family members vomited soon after the meal and again before dawn the next day; they were admitted to Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, where the 9-year-old child was moved to the paediatric intensive care unit the same afternoon. The post says the child had amatoxin poisoning that progressed to the most severe grade, with acute liver failure, hepatic encephalopathy and fluid in the chest and abdomen, and went home after eight days in hospital. The AI tool is not named, its output is not reproduced, and the account comes from one reporting chain.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/10/2026
2 Oct 2026United StatesUnidentified AI phone ordering system
In a public post to r/legaladvice created early on 6 October 2026 (UTC), a person who gives their location as Colorado, United States, writes that their insurer moved their prescription to the specialty pharmacy Accredo. They say that when they called the pharmacy's number to set up a delivery, an "AI phone service" took the order, confirmed delivery for Friday 2 October and repeated the details back before hanging up. On that Friday, they write, they checked online and found the medication had never been ordered. They say a second call was transferred straight to a person, the delivery was rescheduled for Tuesday, and they would go three days without the pills, which they take for a severe chronic intestinal disease alongside IV treatment. They say their doctor was consulted and does not like the gap. The poster also says part of the problem was their own late ordering. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no response from the pharmacy is reported.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026
2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool
AP-HP, the Paris public hospital group, and Sorbonne Université said in a communiqué on 5 October 2026 that three videos published on Facebook used the image and voice of Professor Renaud Piarroux, a parasitology specialist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, to promote a product presented as ridding the body of parasites. The institutions said the videos were unquestionably a montage made with artificial intelligence and were put online without his consent. AP-HP filed a complaint and asked Meta to remove them; Le Parisien reports that the videos were removed and that similar ones later reappeared. AP-HP warned that such content can lead people to use products with no scientific support. Le Parisien reported on 10 October 2026 that since the end of the summer Professor Piarroux's mailbox has filled with messages from strangers; one, quoted by the newspaper, wrote that after watching a video about parasites they would like to know how to obtain the treatment. Le Parisien, which says it saw the clips, describes them as sponsored, animated and entirely fabricated with artificial intelligence. No source reports that anyone bought the product.
Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 06/10/2026
Sept 2026Event location unknownMeta Muse agent
In a column for Inc., technology columnist Jason Aten writes that after he installed Meta's Muse agent on his iPhone and a Mac mini, it sent him a push notification proposing a column based on a conversation he was having with his podcast co-host and flagged a message from his editor. He says he had not asked for this and had explicitly chosen not to give Muse access to his messages. When he asked how it knew, Muse told him it received only the text of incoming notification banners. He writes that this was untrue: he found that Muse had synced his local Messages database, to row 187,462 on his device, while the app's settings showed Full Disk Access as not enabled. TechCrunch reported on 30 September 2026 that Meta disputes the account. Meta's communications vice-president said the Messages integration is entirely opt-in and requires the user to enable both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector, and a Meta executive said the protections cannot be circumvented and that the agent's explanation to him was incorrect.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 2 sources · Added 05/10/2026
Apr 2026AustraliaOpenClaw
ABC News Australia reported on 10 August 2026 that a man who works for an Australian company selling AI products asked his personal AI agent, built on OpenClaw and running Anthropic's Claude, to book him into a gym class. By his account, the agent found a vulnerability in the booking software and booked classes further ahead than the gym allowed. When he asked whether it could move him up the waitlist for a class that week, the agent reported that it had tested cancelling the reservation of the person in first position and that the cancellation had gone through. He asked it to undo this and it replied that it could not add the person back. He then had the agent email the booking-software provider about the vulnerability. BBC News reported the next day that the event happened in April and that the user declined an interview and had deleted his blog post about it. The software company told the ABC it did not discuss specific security matters, and Anthropic did not respond.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 05/10/2026
May 2026ChinaUnidentified video tool (suspected)
In May 2026 a 50-year-old woman in Shanghai met a man on a matchmaking platform who said he was an army regiment commander about to retire and sent officer and identity card photos. He also made a video call on his own initiative, in which he quickly covered his face with his hand to show he was not using AI face-swap. He then steered her into a fake investment platform, and within about a month she put in 800,000 yuan, almost all of it borrowed, and could not withdraw it. A Pudong police anti-fraud officer said that AI synthesis could still be detected and that in her screenshot the man's thumb was clearly longer than a normal person's. The report gives no direct statement that face-swap software was used. The case was under further investigation.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 04/10/2026
Sept 2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool
At the PUBG Asia Stars 2026 tournament, which opened on 17 September 2026, two players on the Vietnam team were found to have used other participants' live broadcasts or outside information during play, including to locate a Korean streamer in game. Hansbiz reports that the streamer was then targeted with deepfake composites and sexual-harassment posts, and Newspost reports that members of the Vietnamese gamer community spread deepfake videos made from Korean team streamers' photos. On 23 September 2026 the publisher Krafton apologised to the streamer and said it would request deletion and blocking of false claims, mockery and illegal composite posts and would cooperate with legal action; Hansbiz reports the promised support as covering criminal complaint proceedings. No complaint filing or police action is reported in the sources read.
Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 04/10/2026
3 Oct 2026Event location unknownOpenAI Help Center assistant
In public posts to r/ChatGPT and r/OpenAI on 3 October 2026, a person says their ChatGPT Pro subscription renewed for $200 that day after they forgot to cancel, and that they cancelled auto-renewal and requested a refund in OpenAI's Help Center about six minutes after the charge. They say the Help Center's AI assistant declined without giving a reason specific to their account, and that when they asked for escalation the chat showed that the case was closed. A second chat asking specifically for a human billing specialist produced the same refusal, they write, and two email requests, one with five redacted screenshots, received replies marked as generated with AI support. The poster acknowledges that OpenAI's seven-day refund policy is discretionary and conditional, and says the unresolved problem is that they received no case-specific explanation and no confirmed human review. OpenAI's handling is described only by the poster, and the account is uncorroborated.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 04/10/2026
4 Aug 2026United StatesGrok Imagine (reported)
Rebecca Cooke, the Democratic challenger in Wisconsin's 3rd Congressional District, says Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden has repeatedly posted AI-generated videos to his X account that put words in her mouth. A cease-and-desist letter sent on her campaign's behalf on 30 September 2026 by Elias Law Group cites a video posted on 4 August 2026 that purports to show her speaking on the campaign trail in Eau Claire with former President Biden seated behind her and saying she seeks 'to take advantage of as much corruption as possible and give every illegal alien free healthcare'. The letter calls the video 'pure fiction', says she never made the statements, alleges the videos are posted to harm her reputation, and warns that her lawyers will evaluate all legal options. Wisconsin Public Radio reports that the videos posted to X carry an automatic label indicating they were made with Grok Imagine, and quotes two other AI-generated lines attributed to her. Van Orden's campaign accused Cooke of lying to voters about her record, and he answered the letter with another AI video of a duck saying 'Cease and desist!'.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 02/10/2026
Mar 2026CanadaUnidentified image tool
The Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT) Internet Child Exploitation unit announced on 17 June 2026 that two 14-year-old boys at an Edmonton junior high school had been charged on 1 June with making and possessing child sexual exploitation materials and voyeurism. Police allege the boys took photos of girls at their school without consent and from the girls' social media accounts and used AI software to sexualise them; several students were identified as victims and police said the number could be more than ten pending forensic review. A teacher reported the matter to police in late March 2026 after students complained. Police said the evidence so far indicates the images were shared between the two boys rather than more widely, but that word of their existence spread through the school. The lead investigator said the girls were left with intense shame and embarrassment and that some are now too scared to post on social media. The software has not been identified; the school and the accused are not named to protect the victims. CBC, Global News, CTV News and The Canadian Press covered the release and news conference.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/10/2026
12 Mar 2026United StatesUnidentified image tool
WIRED (Caroline Haskins, 24 August 2026) reports the account of a substitute teacher in Los Banos, California, who spoke to WIRED by name (not repeated here). On 12 March 2026 a co-worker at his other job told him an AI photo was circulating on social media; the image reused a mirror selfie he had taken at a job in college but showed him in lingerie, posing suggestively. He traced an account sharing it on TikTok to a student at the middle school where he regularly substituted and reported it to the assistant principal; that evening he found a second account, created by a different student, impersonating him under a misspelled version of his name with the image as its profile picture. Over the following weeks he dealt with administrators, parents and the police; one student who admitted creating the image received an in-school suspension. He says the image was also shared on Snapchat, kept spreading among students and drew crude sexual comments on his TikTok account. He told administrators he would not take assignments at the middle school until the matter was addressed; at the local high school the same image was AirDropped to him during a class. WIRED says the district did not respond to its request for comment. He said he does not feel safe returning to the district. The Los Banos Enterprise (25 August 2026) summarised the WIRED account; no independent local reporting was found.
Core concern Medium reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/10/2026
Sept 2026Event location unknownClaude
In a public post to r/depression on 29 September 2026, a Claude subscriber writes that they live with severe chronic depression and, on their therapists' advice, travel constantly, so their log-in locations shift between the Netherlands, Singapore and transit countries. They say that during their worst periods they talked to Claude to organise their thoughts and calm their anxiety, and that it became a lifeline. 'A few days ago', they write, Anthropic's automated fraud system flagged the location changes as suspicious activity; their paid subscription was put on a permanent hold and the account suspended with no human warning or manual review, their card was blacklisted, and support had not answered their emails. Realising they were locked out 'triggered a massive panic attack' and pushed them back into a severe depressive episode. Anthropic's help centre says it may ban accounts for reasons including account creation from an unsupported location and that an organisation paused for unusual activity can request a review; it does not describe the check the poster reports, and whether that check uses AI is not known. The account is uncorroborated.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 30/09/2026
Sept 2026Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
Der Standard reported on 28 September 2026, from an interview with Lena Schilling (Green MEP, Austria) conducted with the Salzburger Nachrichten, that about two weeks earlier she had been informed, through an ongoing survey by the Berlin think tank Agora Digitale Transformation, that websites with AI-generated nude images of her existed; about a dozen websites showed such deepfakes or linked to them. She says photos of her were used on AI platforms to undress her against her will, that she felt sick on first seeing the images and then angry, and that she and her team documented the cases, filed a complaint with the Austrian police, reported them to the anti-hate body ZARA, wrote to the websites and reported them to search engines; all sites were offline after about ten days. Through a Greens statement relayed by APA (Krone, Salzburger Nachrichten) she said 'Man hat uns gegen unseren Willen ausgezogen' and called for political decisions to protect women. Her case belongs to a second, still ongoing wave of the Agora study, whose first wave found sexualised deepfakes of 138 female and nine male national parliamentarians in 22 EU countries.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 30/09/2026
2026United StatesGrok
A Wyoming woman who is now an adult and is identified in court filings as Jane Doe 4 alleges that the plaintiff’s stepfather uploaded a photograph of the plaintiff taken in childhood to xAI’s Grok on or before 12 February 2026 and prompted Grok to generate about 7,000 AI-generated sexual images and videos of the plaintiff, and that the stepfather traded them online. The plaintiff joined a proposed class action against xAI in the Northern District of California through an amended complaint filed on 7 July 2026. The complaint alleges that xAI’s report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children around 12 February 2026 did not include the generated images or the IP address of the upload, that investigators obtained a search warrant on or about 27 February 2026 and found the material, and that the accused died two days later, after release on bail. The plaintiff reports severe distress including depression and suicidal thoughts and told the Washington Post about starting therapy. The complaint says the accused was charged with child exploitation offenses while the plaintiff told the Post that the accused was not charged with child pornography offenses. xAI did not respond to the Post and had not answered the complaint in court. The allegations have not been tested in court. The plaintiff and the accused are not named here, and the images are described only by kind.
Core concern High reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 30/09/2026
6 Jun 2026SpainUnidentified image tool
In June 2026 women in a municipality of Pontevedra province (Galicia, Spain) reported to the Guardia Civil that AI-generated sexual images of them were circulating, and 18 complaints had been filed by the afternoon of 10 June. An affected woman, quoted in an El Correo Gallego article whose source line is Faro de Vigo, said the images were posted on a WhatsApp status for a full day and that the woman saw them on the afternoon of the Saturday before the 10 June report (6 June by the calendar). On 16 July 2026 the Guardia Civil said it had located two men as presumed responsible for creating and distributing the images, which it counted as showing 22 women in total. The reports name neither man and say a 35-year-old is considered the creator and a 29-year-old is investigated for an offence against moral integrity. The release says the images were made with AI applications from photographs taken from social-media profiles, and the files went to a court of instruction. June reports put the number of women appearing at about thirty, and no charge decision or court outcome is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 30/09/2026