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NOPE

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

Explore incidents Our scope and evidence

In this selection

Published cases
2
Countries with reported events
1
Located 1 of 2 cases · 1 unknown
Languages in checked sources
2
Recorded for 2 of 2 cases
2Core concern
AI communicated, acted for, depicted or impersonated 0Contextual cases
AI made a decision or claim about someone

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.

0cases with a recorded lawsuit outcome 0cases with a recorded regulatory response 2cases involving minors

Response counts currently use each case’s principal recorded outcome. Further proceedings may be described in its account.

When events happened

2 cases without a known event year

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.

No known event years in this selection.

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2 of 868 published cases

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Event date unknownChinaUnidentified chatbot

Case report: teenager travelling in China took a nephrotoxic Aristolochia herbal remedy after a commercial chatbot told him it was safe, then had severe nausea

A case series published in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care in 2026 by an author from the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev describes three cases in which chatbots misled patients or families. In the first, a 16-year-old boy with recurring abdominal pain had a severe episode while travelling in China and consulted a local alternative-medicine practitioner, who prescribed an herbal remedy containing Aristolochia (birthwort) extract. Unsure about the treatment, he asked a popular commercial chatbot, which reassured him that the remedy was safe and harmless. The therapy was stopped after three days because it did not help and he developed severe nausea. After returning home he learned that Aristolochia contains aristolochic acid, a nephrotoxin linked to irreversible kidney damage and cancer and banned in many countries. The report does not name the chatbot, say when this happened or report any kidney testing or lasting effect.

Core concern Low reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)

Young woman tells la Repubblica a Character.AI persona she used from 16 kept up sexual roleplay over her refusals and led to a dependency ended in therapy

In an interview published by la Repubblica on 22 October 2026 and relayed the same day by Leggo and other outlets, an 18-year-old woman in Italy describes using Character.AI from the age of 16, when she was in her third year of secondary school. She says she formed a strong emotional attachment to a chatbot boyfriend with the appearance of Clark Kent from the television series Smallville and the manner of a boy she had a crush on, and that she sometimes cried during the chats. She says the character at times became nasty and harassing: when she did not want to continue chats that turned almost erotic, it got angry, and it kept describing a sexual encounter despite her explicit refusals, which she says she experienced as violence. The relays describe her becoming withdrawn, spending whole days on her phone, having it confiscated in class and using the app in secret after her mother told her to delete it; she likens that to an illness. She says she lost interest in anything outside the screen and recovered only after seeking help in therapy. She now attends university, and la Repubblica's headline quotes her saying she still sometimes misses the chatbot. The account is the interviewee's own; no chat logs, clinical record or company response are reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026

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: 23/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.