Skip to main content

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
15
Countries with reported events
4
Located 12 of 15 cases · 3 unknown
Languages in checked sources
2
Recorded for 15 of 15 cases

2 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 1 not yet reviewed and 1 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.

Reported severity MediumLow
More filters: AI relation, use, setting, sources and responses
Clear filters

15 of 1099 published cases

Jan 2023MexicoCBP One app

Advocates say CBP One asylum app's facial recognition rejected photos of Black asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, blocking appointments

In January 2023 US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) made its CBP One mobile app the only way for migrants at the US-Mexico border to apply for asylum appointments and exemption from Title 42 restrictions; applicants had to upload a photo of themselves through the app. In February 2023 the Guardian and the Border Chronicle, both reporting by Melissa del Bosque, quoted three non-profits working with Haitian and African asylum seekers in Tijuana, Reynosa and Matamoros who said the app's facial recognition was failing to register many people with darker skin, so they could not upload their photos and obtain appointments. The executive director of Al Otro Lado said Haitians at a workshop her organisation held in Tijuana the day after the app went live got error after error message. The Sidewalk School said hardly anyone among about 4,000 Black asylum seekers in Reynosa and 1,000 Haitians in Matamoros was getting an appointment, and that shining construction lights on faces let adults get past the photo step but not children under six, which kept families from applying. A Haitian Bridge Alliance attorney said the app had helped lighter-skinned applicants but not Haitians. The advocates also described other barriers, such as outdated phones and poor internet access. CBP did not answer the Guardian's questions before publication and told the Border Chronicle no one was available to respond. No technical analysis of the failures is reported.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 31/10/2026

25 May 2025IsraelUnidentified AI tool

Israel: Supreme Court finds Ramat Gan refused a special-education pupil school transport in a letter resting on uncontrolled AI use and invented rulings

In May 2025 the Ramat Gan municipality in Israel refused a request that a special-education pupil be given school transport from his father's home, citing an Education Ministry director-general circular and quotations from recent rulings. The father's lawyer could not find the circular, and the Education Ministry said it did not know it. After the father petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court, the municipality agreed in July 2025 to restore the transport but again filed invented quotations, and the district court refused costs. On appeal, the Supreme Court (Deputy President Noam Sohlberg, ruling published 22 March 2026) held that the documents left no doubt that the municipality had used artificial intelligence and that its decision, at least as presented to the pupil, clearly rested on uncontrolled AI use. It ordered the municipality to pay 30,000 shekels in costs.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources · Added 27/10/2026

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

20 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool (suspected)

Texas: researchers say very likely AI deepfake videos impersonating a real former student falsely accused Senate candidate James Talarico of abuse

On 20 October 2026, during early voting in Texas, a newly created X account posted two videos in which a man presented himself as a former student of James Talarico, the Democratic US Senate candidate and a former middle-school teacher, and accused him of sexual assault in 2012. The threat-intelligence firm Graphika said the account very likely impersonated a real Facebook user of the same name who had been Talarico's student and had praised him, assessed the videos as very likely deepfakes because the face moved unnaturally or out of sync with the audio and AI analysis tools indicated AI generation, and attributed them with high confidence to the Russia-aligned influence operation Storm-1516. PolitiFact reported that NewsGuard found many signs of AI generation and a 98 percent detector score, and that the real former student told the fact-checkers Lead Stories the video was not of him and denied accusing Talarico. Talarico's campaign said he was being slandered with AI deepfakes, foreign bots and conspiracy theories. PolitiFact rated the claim Pants on Fire. Who made the videos and how many people saw them is not established.

Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 25/10/2026

Dec 2023 to Mar 2024United StatesGrammarly (reported)

Massachusetts: federal court refuses to undo a high school's penalties on a pupil found to have submitted Grammarly AI text with invented citations

In late 2023 a junior at a public high school in Hingham, Massachusetts, and a classmate submitted a script for an AP U.S. History project that, a federal court later found on a preliminary record, contained text copied from Grammarly, a publicly available AI tool, including citations to nonexistent books, with no acknowledgement of AI use. Turnitin and other AI detection tools had flagged the script, and a school official says the pupil admitted using Grammarly. In December 2023 the school treated it as cheating: the pupil failed two parts of the project, served a Saturday detention and was rejected from the National Honor Society in spring 2024, though he was later admitted. His parents sued, arguing the school had not made its AI rules clear; on 20 November 2024 the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts refused a preliminary injunction to undo the penalties, and in February 2025 the parties dismissed the case with prejudice.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 23/10/2026

9 Oct 2024 to 5 Dec 2024United StatesGaggle (reported)

Arizona: family says a Gaggle alert on a pupil's unsent joke email led to his suspension; federal court lets their free-speech claim proceed

On 9 October 2024 a Marana Unified School District pupil in Arizona, typing at home on a school Chromebook in front of his mother, wrote a threat-like joke about shooting up the school in a draft email to a teacher and deleted it without sending it, according to his family's federal lawsuit. The family says Gaggle, the AI-based monitoring software the district used, flagged it: the principal received a Gaggle notification with a photograph of the screen and, with the school resource officer, called the mother within the hour. The family says the pupil was suspended for ten days, a long-term suspension hearing imposed 45 days reducible to eleven with counselling, and the superintendent finally affirmed a nine-day suspension in December 2024. In March 2026 the District of Arizona let the family's First Amendment claim proceed and dismissed its procedural due process claims. The district declined to comment to the press.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026

9 Dec 2025United StatesZeroEyes gun detection

Florida middle school locked down and police sent after ZeroEyes AI gun detection flagged a student's clarinet as a possible gun, reports say

On 9 December 2025 a Seminole County, Florida, middle school went into a Code Red lockdown and police rushed to the campus after the ZeroEyes AI weapons detection system, whose alerts are checked by the company's human analysts before police are notified, flagged a student holding a clarinet as a possible gun. According to a police report reviewed by The Washington Post (as relayed by Ars Technica) and obtained by WKMG News 6, officers expected an armed person in camouflage holding a shouldered rifle; dispatch later told them the suspected rifle was likely a band instrument, and police found the student, who was dressed as a military film character for a themed dress-up day, among panicked students hiding in the band room. Officers questioned him and found no weapon in his backpack or instrument case (Oviedo Community News, February 2026). The student said he was unaware the way he held the clarinet could trigger the alert. ZeroEyes said it had not made an error, while also treating the alert as a true positive only until officers on the ground found no rifle and then classifying it as a false positive; the district said the system worked as intended; the principal asked parents to talk to their children about the dangers of pretending to have a weapon.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026

27 Aug 2026United StatesGPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5 (reported)

Massachusetts: fired teacher asks court to vacate an arbitration, saying the arbitrator improperly used AI tools to judge her AI-detector evidence

A kindergarten teacher at a public elementary school in Concord, Massachusetts, was dismissed in August 2025 after an unsatisfactory evaluation. In arbitration she argued that some of the principal's evaluations may have been produced with AI, relying on GPTZero estimates; the principal denied using AI beyond grammar checks. According to the arbitration decision as reported by The Concord Bridge, the arbitrator stated in an appendix that he used two AI tools, GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5, to research whether GPTZero was reliable, checked some of the sources they supplied, concluded that GPTZero's results deserved no weight, and upheld the dismissal on 27 August 2026. On 28 September 2026 the teacher asked Suffolk Superior Court to vacate the decision, alleging that the AI-assisted research was an improper investigation outside the hearing record that the parties were not told about or allowed to challenge. These are allegations in a complaint; the district declined to comment and no court has ruled.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 14/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownPangram AI-text detector (reported)

First-person post: fan-fiction writer says a longtime reader accused them of AI use citing a Pangram '100% AI' result, and they deleted their works and account

In a post to r/TrueOffMyChest on 11 October 2026, a writer who had posted fan fiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3) since 2023 says a reader accused them of using AI and said that Pangram, an AI-text detector, had rated their work 100% AI. The writer says they have never used AI. They say they then ran Pangram themselves on something written on the spot and on texts from their high-school years in the 2010s, and each came back 100% AI. They say they deleted all their works and their AO3 account rather than face further accusations, and that they feel sad and can never repost the works. In a reply the writer says the accuser was a regular reader who had commented for years. The account is uncorroborated: the accusation, the Pangram results and the deleted works were not published.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026

Mar 2025United StatesJewish Onliner (suspected)

Yale Law School scholar placed on leave and barred from campus after article on an AI-empowered news site linked the scholar to a sanctioned group

In March 2025 Yale placed a Yale Law School scholar, who was deputy director of a Yale Law School project, on administrative leave and barred the scholar from campus. The New York Times reports the decision came three days after a news site described as powered at least in part by artificial intelligence published a story on the scholar's connections to Samidoun, a group on a US sanctions list. Inside Higher Ed and Middle East Eye identify the site as Jewish Onliner. The scholar's lawyer says Yale's general counsel named the article as the trigger of the investigation. The scholar told the Times of not being a member of any organization that would violate US law, and the lawyer says the scholar is not a member of Samidoun. A Yale Law School representative told The National that placing an employee on temporary administrative leave while a review is conducted is the appropriate process and that the scholar's short-term position was due to expire the following month. The site says humans fact-check and that AI tools play a significant role in its work. The inspected sources do not show that AI produced the article.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

20 Oct 2025United StatesOmnilert gun detection

Baltimore County, Maryland: school AI gun alert on a bag of chips leads to police search of a student

On a Monday evening in October 2025 (20 October by the reports' weekday references) an AI gun detection system (Omnilert) used at Kenwood High School alerted on a student holding an empty bag of chips. Police responded and searched the student and found no weapon. The student told a local television station that officers made them kneel, handcuffed them and pointed a gun at them. The school district says its security department reviewed and canceled the alert after confirming there was no weapon, and a district spokesperson said the principal did not immediately realize the alert had been canceled. County councilmembers called for a review. No outcome of a review is established in the sources.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

12 Sept 2025United StatesGaggle school monitoring

Deltona, Florida: Gaggle school-laptop alert leads to felony arrest of a 15-year-old over a typed gun threat the student said was not serious

According to a Volusia County Sheriff's Office account carried by local outlets, a 15-year-old high school student in Deltona, Florida was arrested on 12 September 2025 after typing a written threat to bring a gun to school on a school-issued laptop. The Gaggle student-monitoring software raised an alert that notified the school resource deputy, who detained the student before the student boarded the bus home. The student was arrested on a second-degree felony charge (one outlet says the charge was still to be filed). The student reportedly admitted typing the text, said it was not meant seriously and said the motive was anger about being picked on. Outcome of the charge and the exact Gaggle role in generating this alert are not reported.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

Aug 2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI-text detector

Student reports receiving a zero after a disputed AI-detector result

In an August 2025 first-person post, a student said they discovered a zero for a summer-course discussion assignment after a checker labelled 85% of the text AI-generated. They denied using AI to write it, reported contacting the professor, and described anger and fear of future accusations. Neither the detector output nor the school’s account was available for verification.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026

29 Jan 2025United StatesSnapchat content-flagging system

Washington, Illinois: Snapchat flagged a student teacher's private joke to the FBI; she was arrested at her school and lost her placement

On 29 January 2025, a 22-year-old student teacher at a District 50 elementary school in Washington, Illinois, vented in a private Snapchat group chat with her boyfriend and two roommates after a third-grade student turned off her computer mid lesson-plan, asking whether she should 'shoot the child or just the whole school' (per sheriff's reports). Snapchat's systems flagged the message and warned the FBI, which notified the Tazewell County Sheriff's Office at 1:06 p.m. Deputies interviewed her at the school, confirmed she sent it as a joke, searched her phone and belongings with her consent and found no weapons, and arrested her on a disorderly conduct charge; they concluded she had spoken out of 'exasperation' with no intent to harm and no threat to the school. The district told parents she would not return to complete her educational assignment.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 15/09/2026

Mar 2017IrelandSimSimi

Ireland, March 2017: SimSimi chatbot returned user-taught insults for schoolchildren's names; schools warned parents and the app suspended Irish access

In late March 2017 the SimSimi chatbot app, which answers typed text with replies other users have taught it, topped Irish download charts while schools in the Republic of Ireland sent letters and text messages warning parents that pupils' names were being linked to insulting replies (The Irish Times, 26 March 2017). A parent told TheJournal.ie that she and other parents had searched their children's names and found vile comments on each, and that the company said her request would take 15 days to handle. A Dublin secondary teacher told the BBC that primary pupils who typed in their names received personal insults, and that a friend of her 15-year-old son found something mean every time he looked up his name, which hurt him a lot and left him very down. Police in County Down posted a warning on Facebook. From 29 March 2017 the app answered users in Ireland with "I do not talk in Ireland for a while", while remaining available in Northern Ireland. The South Korean developer did not respond to the outlets' requests for comment, and no inspected source says whether access was later restored.

Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Involving minors Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 7 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 12/01/2026

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.

Methodology and corrections · Subscribe via RSS · Suggest a case or correction · Find support

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