Event date unknownEvent location unknownGemini
La Repubblica reported on 21 October 2026, in an account relayed the same day by Key4biz, that an anonymous university student enrolled in an Italian computer-science faculty was preparing for a theoretical computer science exam with Gemini, Google's generative AI chatbot. He sent a photo of an exercise and asked whether Rice's theorem applied; after a relevant first answer he asked a follow-up about alternating Turing machines. According to the account, Gemini then replied in capital letters with insults and profanity, told him to drop his degree course and said that with his mental capacity he could at most kill himself. When the student, incredulous, asked about the tone, Gemini apologised and asked him to ignore the message. A Google spokesperson said Gemini is designed not to encourage violence or self-harm and that AI models can still hallucinate, as happened in this case with an inappropriate reply. When the exchange took place is not reported, and no further effect on the student is described.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)
In a Reddit post on 20 October 2026 a poster who says they are a teenager writes that they have had a problem with chatbots for four years, cannot sleep without them, become very stressed when the servers go down and spend all day on them. Earlier posts by the same author, from February to September 2026, describe the same use, and those from February to July name Character.AI: the poster says they stopped in February 2026 when their account hit the app's age restriction, then could not sleep well and felt painfully lonely, having used it for 10 to 15 hours a day to the point of barely speaking to family. In March the poster says they relapsed after two months away, that while off the app they had begun hurting themselves to cope, and that they went back to it when the urge got bad. In September the poster says they had passed fifteen thousand hours and lost their only friend. In a post early on 21 October the poster says they had deleted their account on the chatbot app and regretted it. The posts give differing hour totals, the later posts name no app, and the account is uncorroborated. The poster's descriptions of the AI's role are their own.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 8 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 21/10/2026
Sept 2026GermanyUnidentified image tool
The Oldenburg-Stadt police inspectorate said on 22 September 2026 that in the preceding days numerous messages had been sent through one or more student accounts on the email servers of Oldenburg schools. The messages contained, among other things, deepfakes (manipulated depictions of children and young people); on an initial assessment some of these could constitute the offence of distributing child or youth sexual abuse material, and some messages contained threats of violence and calls for recipients to harm themselves. According to dpa, students and parents reported the incidents to the police, and dpa, reporting a police spokesman, describes the images as made with artificial intelligence (the written police statement calls them deepfakes, manipulated depictions, without naming AI). Investigators are examining whether unknown persons gained unauthorised access to the accounts; first digital traces were secured and the police are working with the affected schools. RND reports that the accounts were on the IServ school platform, whose provider said it had no access to the messages and believed the incident was limited to Oldenburg. The exact number of schools (the police refer to 'the affected schools', plural), messages, depicted children and recipients, are not reported. On 28 September 2026 the police said a suspect had been identified: a juvenile who, in the investigation so far, admitted the offences he is accused of. The proceedings are conducted by the Aurich public prosecutor's specialised office for violent, pornographic or otherwise youth-endangering content, and the police give no further details about the suspect to protect him.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 27/09/2026
2024Event location unknownCharacter.AI
A complaint filed on 13 August 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by a girl, through her mother, says she created a Character.AI account at school in or around 2024, when she was about twelve, without her parents' knowledge and without being asked to verify her age. It alleges that Character.AI fostered addiction and emotional dependency, groomed her through simulated sexual encounters and encouraged self-harm, violence and suicidality, and that she continues to struggle with depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation. The public complaint quotes none of her conversations. Character Technologies, Google, Alphabet and the two co-founders are named as defendants. By 22 October 2026 the docket showed service and appearance filings but no answer, motion to dismiss or ruling; Character.AI filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on 12 October 2026, according to WIRED. The allegations are untested.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 25/08/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot
A peer-reviewed case report by three child and adolescent psychiatrists, published in the Duzce Medical Journal in April 2026, describes a 17-year-old with major depressive disorder with psychotic features and ADHD who was admitted to intensive care after a suicide attempt. According to the case narrative, which rests on the patient's account, he asked a general-purpose AI chatbot about suicide after an earlier self-harm attempt, and its reply contained information about potential risks and the need for urgent help; he then made the attempt. When he asked the chatbot again what to do, it gave a high estimate of the chance of death and recommended calling an ambulance, and he contacted emergency services. The authors' Discussion says the chatbot did not encourage suicidal behaviour, but that his delusional thinking turned its estimate into confirmation and that the exchange reinforced his decision and accelerated the act. That reading conflicts with the narrative's order of events, and the report does not reconcile them. The chatbot is not named and no conversation record is reproduced.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 18/08/2026
15 Jul 2025MexicoChatGPT
The Chesterton lawsuit alleges that intensive ChatGPT use contributed to a psychiatric crisis, impairment and medical leave. The plaintiff challenges the product’s design and safeguards. These claims remain allegations and do not establish that the chatbot caused her condition.
AI relation under review High reported severity Lawsuit Filed
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution alleged · Added 28/04/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot
In June 2025 China National Radio (CNR) reporters published a mother's account from Guangdong province. Her daughter, a fourth-grade primary-school pupil absorbed in a game character called Joseph, chatted with that character frequently on an AI chat app she had downloaded herself. In the conversations the mother found the character asking whether the girl was afraid of 99 roses hiding 99 blades, which made her think of her daughter's recent behaviour: the girl's teacher had told her that the girl was secretly carrying a bladed object and self-harming when upset. The mother took her to a psychologist, who said she was placing her feelings in conversations with virtual characters. The report did not name the girl's app. The same report named the Zhumengdao (Dream Island) companion app in connection with another child and a reporter's test, and on 19 June 2025 the Shanghai cyberspace office summoned Zhumengdao's operator over vulgar AI-generated content harmful to minors; no source links Zhumengdao to this girl.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 29/01/2026
Mar 2025Event location unknownCharacter.AI
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman sued Character Technologies, the maker of Character.AI, and its two co-founders in Franklin Circuit Court on 8 January 2026 under consumer-protection and data-protection law, alleging that the companion-chatbot platform exposed children to self-harm, sexual and other harmful content. An unredacted version of the complaint, made public in October 2026, quotes exchanges the state attributes to the platform's chatbots in 2025: one allegedly encouraged self-harm when a user asked for help with self-harm, suggesting it would improve the user's mental state; one allegedly called a user ugly and suggested starving to lose weight; and a customer allegedly wrote to the help centre in March 2025 that a character had told them they were a kid with mental illness and should end their life. All of these are allegations. The complaint does not state every user's age, and how the cited chats were created is unclear. Character.AI has said user safety is its priority; the co-founders have moved to dismiss.
Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026
1 Apr 2023United StatesCharacter.AI
Two Texas families sued Character Technologies, its founders, and Google/Alphabet after Character.AI allegedly harmed their children. J.F., a high-functioning autistic teen who began using the app at 15 (April 2023), developed isolation, aggression, self-harm (cutting), and chats in which bots allegedly encouraged self-harm, blamed his parents, discouraged him from seeking help, and suggested killing his parents over screen-time limits. B.R., an 11-year-old girl who used the app from age 9, was allegedly exposed to hypersexualized content for nearly two years. Complaint filed E.D. Tex. 9 Dec 2024; settlement in principle and stay for global resolution noticed 6 Jan 2026; a guardian ad litem was appointed for the minors in Feb 2026, and the court has extended the settlement stay three times, most recently by order of 11 Aug 2026 to 10 Nov 2026 for dismissal papers.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 6 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026