19 Jun 2026 to 13 Aug 2026BrazilChatGPT and OpenAI moderation
Over about two months in 2026 a 36-year-old farmer in rural São Gabriel da Palha, Espírito Santo, exchanged messages with ChatGPT that the Espírito Santo civil police describe as plans to kill his eight-year-old son, attack other people and kill himself; one message said he had offered 50,000 to someone to kill him and his son. OpenAI reported the messages to the FBI, which passed them through Brazil's Ministry of Justice cyber-operations laboratory to the state police on 16 June; the man was arrested on 19 June as he left home, a day before the date on which police believed the plan would be carried out. Police say what the platform provided was corroborated at the scene (four bottles of unidentified substances and a knotted rope were found) but that he denied intending to kill the child; his lawyer says he was talking nonsense to a chatbot and took no concrete step. After 54 days in custody a court granted habeas corpus on 13 August 2026 because the inquiry had not been concluded and no charges had been brought, imposing electronic monitoring and a ban on approaching or contacting his son and the child's mother. Police were still examining his phone and awaiting forensic results. OpenAI provided user details and his messages but not ChatGPT's replies and did not answer the BBC's question why; it told the BBC it may notify law enforcement when it detects a credible and imminent risk of harm to others. The case is recorded as an institutional response to AI use: the reported adverse consequence is the detention without charge, and the police account that the report prevented a planned killing is preserved as context.
Core + contextual relations High reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/09/2026
1 Jan 2026IndonesiaUnidentified image and video tool
A female student at a state university in Solo (Surakarta), Central Java, learned on 1 January 2026 from friends that her face had been composited onto pornographic images and a video, which her lawyer said were found on Instagram and Telegram. Her family reported the case to the Central Java regional police cyber directorate on 28 January 2026. Police issued a formal police report on 31 July, arrested her ex-boyfriend, a university student in Semarang, at his boarding house in Gunungpati on 4 August 2026, and detained him. The police spokesman said the suspect used AI to place the complainant's face on another woman's naked body so that she appeared in pornographic content, uploaded it to his X account, did not sell it, and acted out of resentment after an on-and-off relationship ended. He faces charges under Articles 51 and 35 of the Electronic Information and Transactions Law and an article printed by two outlets as 'Law No. 1 of 2026', with a maximum of 12 years' imprisonment. Her lawyer said she could not sleep, withdrew, felt shame and at one point lost hope, that his team had found seven women in total allegedly targeted of whom six had not reported, and that the suspect's parents asked for an out-of-court settlement; police said only one complainant was confirmed.
Core concern High reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 20/09/2026
15 Jul 2026ChinaDoubao, Qwen and Yuanbao
When China's five-department rules on anthropomorphic AI took effect on July 15, 2026, ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen, and Tencent's Yuanbao switched off custom AI agent and companion features, and major outlets documented an outpouring of grief from users who had formed long-term romantic and familial attachments to the agents. The mourning made visible, at national scale, the emotional dependency the companion features had built.
AI relation under review Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution supported · Added 06/08/2026
Mar 2026IndiaUnidentified image and video tool
Indore police registered an FIR at Banganga police station on a first-year college student's complaint reported on 12 and 13 May 2026. She said she had met the accused, a young man from the Indore area, at her sister's wedding in 2024, where he took some photographs of her; he later pressed her to marry him and, when she refused, threatened to edit her photographs with AI into objectionable (Navbharat Times, Amar Ujala) or obscene (Patrika) images and post them online. Navbharat Times reports that he edited the pictures with AI, blackmailed her with them and, after her family arranged her engagement elsewhere, reached her fiancé and showed him the edited pictures, after which the families quarrelled and the engagement was broken; Patrika says he went to the fiancé's home and intimidated him into breaking the match; Amar Ujala says he also threatened to kill her and her family and sent edited pictures when her family tried to reason with him, and that when her engagement took place about two months earlier he went to her house and made false allegations about her character in front of the prospective fiancé, after which the engagement broke. She went into severe mental distress and, according to Amar Ujala, had resolved to take a suicidal step before telling her family, who took her to the police. The FIR was registered under the IT Act and sections on criminal intimidation and defamation; police were searching for the accused.
Core concern High reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/06/2026