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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 is wider: it also records consequential decisions and claims about people. Each account is reviewed for publication; claims may remain uncorroborated or disputed. How we review and count cases

In this selection

Published cases
2
Countries with reported events
1
Located 2 of 2 cases · 0 unknown
Languages in checked sources
1
Recorded for 2 of 2 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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2 of 452 published cases

9 Jan 2026United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system

Brooklyn Center, Minnesota: immigration agents in Border Patrol vests handcuffed a U.S. citizen who was working at a house in January 2026 and an agent told him after a facial recognition scan that he was born in Mexico City; a federal judge found he was detained solely because of his race or ethnicity, and a second scan confirmed his citizenship before release

In findings of fact filed on 9 March 2026 in Hussen v. Noem, a proposed class action over immigration stops during Operation Metro Surge, Judge Eric C. Tostrud of the U.S. District Court in Minnesota found that a U.S. citizen working at a house in Brooklyn Center on 9 January 2026 was stopped and detained based solely on his race or ethnicity. Two agents with 'border patrol' on their vests asked where he was born, said his REAL ID papers were fake and his driver's licence proved nothing, and handcuffed him. According to the findings, one agent conducted a facial recognition scan and told him he was born in Mexico City; in his sworn declaration the man says the agent also told him he was not a U.S. citizen and was under arrest. After about thirty minutes of driving, a different agent used a facial recognition scan that determined he was a citizen, and he was released. The government's declarations did not dispute his account. The judge denied a preliminary injunction for lack of a certainly impending future injury, and the plaintiffs later dismissed the suit. No source read names the facial recognition application. A complaint filed on 1 October 2026 over the killing of Renee Good restates the episode.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 02/10/2026

7 Jan 2026 to 9 Jan 2026United StatesGrok

Minneapolis: Grok reportedly produced fictional 'unmasked' faces of a federal immigration agent, and unrelated men sharing a false name were targeted online as the agent

After a federal immigration agent killed a woman in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026, X users circulated AI-generated images that purported to show the masked agent's face. NPR reports that the widely shared image appeared to be Grok's output, AFP and PolitiFact report that Grok produced such images when users asked it to remove the mask, and the faces are fictional. Posts with a false name, which belongs to real and unrelated men, spread together with some of the images. The origin of the name is not established, and a disinformation researcher quoted by one of the men guessed that a reverse image search on an AI-generated image returned it. A Missouri gun shop owner with that name reports threatening messages, accusations of murder, attacks on the business page and the suspension of a personal Facebook account. The publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, who has the same name, reports hundreds and then thousands of posts naming the publisher as the agent, including calls for vigilante justice, and the newspaper issued a statement calling it a coordinated disinformation campaign. AFP reports that xAI answered its inquiry with an automated reply. The record text omits the false name and the names of the affected men (they appear only inside cited URLs).

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources · Added 30/09/2026

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: 02/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.