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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
6
Countries with reported events
3
Located 3 of 6 cases · 3 unknown
Languages in checked sources
6
Recorded for 6 of 6 cases

6 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 0 not yet reviewed and 6 reviewed as unknown. Show all 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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6 of 1075 published cases

29 Jan 2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI analysis system

Spanish court rules a sugar company lab manager's dismissal unfair over underpaid severance; employer said AI had replaced lab analysis, report says

Noticias Trabajo reports that a sugar company dismissed its laboratory manager on economic and organisational grounds on 29 January 2025. According to the report, the company cited multimillion-euro losses from a fall in sugar prices and a new model that replaced traditional laboratory analysis with artificial intelligence and remote sensing, which made the physical laboratory he ran unnecessary and led to its closure. He had first been moved to a technician post, which the company then also cut. He challenged the dismissal: the first-instance social court found that the company had calculated his severance on a shortened length of service and a lower daily salary, paying 6,427 euros instead of 8,556 euros, and declared the dismissal unfair. The High Court of Justice of Castilla y Leon (judgment 18/2026) upheld that ruling, finding the shortfall of almost 25% showed a conscious and deliberate intention to pay less. The report says the grounds for the dismissal were valid and that the ruling was not final.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 01/11/2026

7 Jul 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI tools

Hotel software firm Mews laid off about 15% of its roughly 1,350 staff, saying it must become an AI-native company; Czech employees later formed a union

On Tuesday 7 July 2026 Mews, a hotel-management software company with Czech roots, announced that it was letting go about 15 percent of its roughly 1,350 employees, which CzechCrunch put at about 200 people. Its founder said the business was in a very strong position and growing fast, but that artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the economics of hospitality and can now handle much of the executive part of the professional services that hotels pay for, and that to help its customers become AI-native the company had to become AI-native itself. Its product and technology director told Lupa.cz the company had completed a ground-up review of how work is done in an AI-native world, that the decision was proactive and not a reaction to financial pressure, and that the organisation was being designed around what AI enables. The company said the cuts affected positions across all teams and regions and largely spared customer-facing roles. In October 2026 Lupa.cz reported that employees at the company's Czech head office had formed a trade union within the ICT Union, shortly after a layoff it described as officially due to changes brought by AI; the union wants a collective agreement and to be informed before decisions on layoffs and reorganisations. The sources do not say which roles, if any, were taken over by AI tools, how many dismissed employees worked in the Czech Republic, or what severance they received.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 30/10/2026

23 Jun 2025NetherlandsChatGPT

Dutch court rules a recruitment consultant's summary dismissal invalid; his employer had cited his ChatGPT queries about severance among seven grounds

On 23 June 2025 a recruitment agency summarily dismissed a recruitment consultant it had employed since January 2024, giving seven grounds in its dismissal letter. One ground, misuse of company resources and an integrity breach, concerned questions he had put to ChatGPT on his work laptop about how to obtain a severance payment from the employer: the employer said he made defamatory statements about it there and breached his duty of confidentiality with the information he entered. He did not dispute the queries. In a decision given on 27 February 2026, the sub-district judge of the Rechtbank Zeeland-West-Brabant ruled the dismissal invalid, because the employer had not established another ground and the seven grounds formed a single composite reason. On the ChatGPT ground the judge found that private use of the laptop had not been forbidden, that he had shared only information about his employment relationship and no company secrets, and that this was culpable to a limited extent. In a final decision of 22 May 2026 the court awarded him a transition payment of 2,976.04 euros gross, fixed damages of 4,565.70 euros gross and costs, but refused the 25,000 euros of fair compensation he sought, weighing his limited income loss and his own culpable conduct, which it listed as including his sharing of information about the employment relationship. His fixed-term contract would have ended on 1 August 2025, when he started a new job.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/10/2026

2025RussiaDeepSeek

Moscow court upholds a sales director's dismissal for disclosing trade secrets, including uploading company reports to DeepSeek, and rejects her severance claim

A Moscow district court upheld an engineering company's dismissal of its head of sales for disclosing trade secrets, according to RAPSI and Pravo.ru reports of 27 July 2026. The grounds included uploading protected internal reports to the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, forwarding company documents to her personal email and disclosing strategic information to a supplier. The court held that uploading trade secrets to DeepSeek is in itself a disclosure. She had sought a dismissal by mutual agreement and a contractual severance payment of 5 million roubles. The court rejected both, annulled a separate reprimand and awarded her compensation for moral harm. The decision was not yet final.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 19/10/2026

2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI model

Former iGaming designer tells Times of Malta employer decided an AI model the team had trained could replace about half the design team

Times of Malta reported on 18 October 2026, from interviews with anonymous former gambling-sector employees, that iGaming companies are laying off staff as they turn to AI. One former designer, who says they lost their job earlier in 2026, says their team had been told to train an AI model to make design and brand-guideline decisions, presented as a tool to help designers, and that the company later decided the model was fit enough to replace around half of the design team, including those who trained it. The designer says there was no notice, that they were asked to resign later that day and that the severance was the bare minimum. The outlet omitted company names, and the workers said they had signed non-disclosure agreements. GamingMalta, the industry promotion foundation, told the outlet it sees talent being redeployed rather than replaced by AI, and the article notes that others pointed to search-engine changes and higher UK gambling taxes. The account is a single anonymous worker's, relayed by one outlet; the employer and where the job was based are not stated.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 19/10/2026

Jan 2025ItalyUnidentified customer-service AI tool

Genoa court reinstates a Maersk Italia worker whose January 2025 dismissal unions linked to AI replacing customer service tasks

In January 2025 Maersk Italia, the Genoa-based Italian arm of the Danish logistics group, dismissed four employees of its Customer Service department without warning, according to the regional transport unions Filt Cgil, Fit Cisl and Uiltrasporti, who called a one-day strike. The unions said the company had moved the work to Manila and had also replaced part of the tasks done by the Genoa staff with artificial intelligence. One of the four, a woman, sued, while the other three accepted a severance offer. Euronews reported on 30 April 2026 that the Genoa labour court had ordered her reinstatement with compensation for the months she went unpaid, finding the dismissal unlawful because the employer had not tried to redeploy her within the company. A legal commentary in Domani gives the judgment's date as 30 March 2026, while Euronews says the decision came on Thursday, the eve of 1 May. The unions that backed the case described it as the first Italian case in which judges ruled on a dismissal linked to AI, although the Domani commentary also cites a Rome ruling of November 2025 on an AI-related dismissal. The Domani commentary does not name the employer. No source describes the AI system or what it did, and Maersk's account of the dismissals was not found.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 11/10/2026

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: 01/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.