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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
4
Countries with reported events
4
Located 4 of 4 cases · 0 unknown
Languages in checked sources
3
Recorded for 4 of 4 cases

1 case has no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 1 not yet reviewed and 0 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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4 of 1101 published cases

2024United StatesGaggle

Lawrence, Kansas: students say Gaggle AI monitoring flagged class photography as child sexual images, leading to questioning and removed work

The Lawrence, Kansas, school district began using Gaggle, a student-monitoring service, on school accounts in November 2023. A federal lawsuit filed on 1 August 2025 by current and former students alleges that Gaggle, which the complaint says operates through artificial intelligence that flags items for review by Gaggle moderators, flagged original photography assignments uploaded by art and photography students. According to the complaint, in early 2024 security officers took students out of class to the front office of a Lawrence high school, where administrators told them their images had been flagged by Gaggle for indecent exposure and child pornography; an assistant principal accused a photography student of having such material, refused to let her view the images, and questioned her about them from memory, and administrators admitted they had not seen the flagged content. The student told them she had uploaded that day a photography assignment showing a fully clothed friend; the complaint says the flagged content consisted of original photographs taken for class assignments, that students found their photographs removed from their school accounts only by comparing them with personal backups, that one student had to explain each image in her portfolio to district staff and became concerned that future assignments would bring more scrutiny, and that the district restored the images only after months of advocacy. The Associated Press, in reporting that included an analysis of the district's Gaggle alert records, said the photos had been automatically deleted and that students with backups showed it was a false alarm, and that district officials said they later adjusted the software's settings to reduce false alerts. On 8 April 2026 the federal court dismissed, on qualified immunity, the claims against the assistant principal and another official, saying it had found no law establishing that a school official cannot rely on an AI surveillance flag to call in a student for questioning; other claims against the district continue, and the docket shows depositions noticed in October 2026.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 27/10/2026

2024GermanyMicrosoft Copilot

German court reporter says Microsoft Copilot described him as a child abuser and fraudster and gave out his address; prosecutors rejected his complaint

A court reporter from the Tübingen area found in 2024 that Microsoft's Copilot, asked about him, described him as a man charged in a child abuse case, an escapee from a psychiatric institution and a fraudster who cheated widows, according to his account to the public broadcaster SWR as relayed by heise and ComputerBild. All were defendants in trials he had covered as a journalist. heise and ComputerBild, both citing SWR, report that Copilot also gave his private phone number and full home address and offered a route there. He told The Register that seeing his name tied to these crimes was traumatising and that prosecutors had rejected his criminal complaint in two instances; according to the SWR account relayed by heise, the complaint failed because no real person was the author. After the Bavarian data-protection authority contacted Microsoft the claims were briefly unavailable and then returned. Microsoft told The Register it had investigated and taken appropriate and immediate action.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 25/10/2026

13 Apr 2024BrazilUnidentified facial recognition system

Aracaju (Brazil): facial recognition falsely matched a football fan to a wanted man; police led him from the stands and the state suspended the system

During the half-time interval of the Sergipe state football championship final at the Batistão stadium in Aracaju on 13 April 2024, military police took a personal trainer from the stands to a police room after the stadium's facial recognition system flagged him as a man with an open arrest warrant; he was searched and questioned and released once police confirmed he was not the person sought (G1, his lawyer and the military police). Sergipe's governor publicly regretted 'the failure of the facial recognition tool' and suspended its use until a new protocol was adopted. In June 2024 the man sued the state for 550,000 reais in moral damages; the state argued that the Aracaju municipality, not the state, had contracted the system. In December 2025 the judge rejected that preliminary objection, according to Mangue Jornalismo, which read the court file. No final judgment is reported.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 24/10/2026

23 Sept 2024CanadaOtter.ai (reported)

Ontario hospital reports that an Otter.ai bot joined physicians' rounds through a former doctor's invite, recorded them and emailed patient information

An Ontario hospital reported to the provincial privacy commissioner that on 23 September 2024 the Otter.ai transcription tool, installed on a personal device by a physician who had left the hospital in June 2023 and was still on the meeting invite, joined a virtual hepatology rounds meeting, recorded it without notice and then emailed a summary and transcript access to the invite list. The personal health information of seven patients, including diagnoses and treatment, was captured; 12 of the 65 recipients appeared to have left the hospital. The commissioner's letter of 27 October 2025 recommended that the hospital itself ask Otter.ai to delete the retained patient data.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 21/10/2026

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.