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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
846
Countries with reported events
60
Located 565 of 846 cases · 281 unknown
Languages in checked sources
47
Recorded for 846 of 846 cases

75 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 23 not yet reviewed and 52 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.

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846 of 868 published cases · page 1 of 43

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

Event date unknownUkraineChatGPT (reported)

Ukraine's anti-corruption court appeals chamber refused to consider an appeal the applicant had drafted with ChatGPT, calling it disrespect, report says

The Appeals Chamber of Ukraine's High Anti-Corruption Court left without consideration an appeal that the applicant had drafted with the ChatGPT chatbot, treating the approach as a sign of disrespect for the judicial system, UkraNews reported on 15 June 2025 from a ruling in the court-decision register. According to the report, the applicant wrote in the appeal that she had turned to AI after her lawyers declined to prepare it, and the court said the text contained sarcastic and offensive wording about the courts and that using ChatGPT-generated material without proper legal grounds contradicted the principles of judicial proceedings. The appeal concerned an investigating judge's refusal of her complaint about inaction by anti-corruption investigators and prosecutors. The ruling could be challenged in cassation within three months; no later outcome was found.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

19 Mar 2026Event location unknownChatGPT

Brasília labour court upholds the for-cause dismissal of a manager it found used ChatGPT to alter a delivery photo to contest an iFood customer's complaint

In a judgment of 30 July 2026, the 2nd Labour Court of Brasília (Regional Labour Court of the 10th Region) upheld the dismissal for cause, on 19 March 2026, of a manager hired in June 2024. The employer said he had used artificial intelligence to falsify photos of orders on the iFood delivery app. A witness told the court she saw him use ChatGPT to alter a photo of an incomplete order, in which two of four soft drinks had been sent, so that it appeared complete, and use it to contest the customer's complaint to iFood support. The judge found this an act of dishonesty and misconduct that broke the trust required of a manager, rejected his claim that the dismissal was fabricated in retaliation for a claim he had filed the day before, dismissed all his claims, denied severance items and ordered him to pay 10% counsel fees, suspended because he was granted free legal aid. The legal news site Migalhas reported the judgment on 3 August 2026. No appeal is reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · 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

Event date unknownRussiaUnidentified legal research tool

Russian intellectual property court fined an Udmurtia entrepreneur 5,000 roubles over non-existent case law he said an AI service selected, reports say

Russia's Court for Intellectual Property Rights fined an individual entrepreneur from Udmurtia 5,000 roubles for contempt of court after finding that part of the 12 references to case law in his cassation appeal, including one said to be a Supreme Court position, pointed to court acts that do not exist or attributed conclusions to them, the court's press service told RIA Novosti on 27 August 2026. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports that the entrepreneur explained he had prepared the appeal with an AI-based service that selected the case law, and that his side argued he had no legal education and could not check the references; the court rejected the argument that the errors were technical. The date of the ruling and the AI service are not reported.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action

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

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified chatbot

Alcorn State instructor says 32 of 35 students failed part of a midterm after a hidden prompt showed chatbot-written answers; one later had her grade changed

An Alcorn State University history professor in Mississippi said in TikTok videos from 20 July 2026, reported by TechSpot, Fox News and SuperTalk Mississippi, that he had hidden an instruction in white text in a midterm discussion question telling an AI to place the word Madagascar in the answer in a way that makes no sense. According to his account, 32 of 35 students across two classes pasted the question into a chatbot and submitted its output, which mentioned Madagascar in nonsensical sentences, and those students failed that portion of the midterm. He said he let students contest the grade or resubmit their own response; two contested, and one student had her grade changed after saying she had read the hidden text in dark mode and thought it was part of the assignment. He later reported final grades that included one F. The account rests on the instructor's videos; no student or university statement is reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026

4 Sept 2026 to 13 Oct 2026RomaniaUnidentified image and document tool

Romanian police say AI-made documents and photos won an older woman's trust in a fake stock-investment scheme that cost her over 250,000 lei

Police in Alba county, Romania, said on 22 October 2026 that an older woman had been persuaded, under the pretext of earning money from stock-market investments, to hand over about 253,600 lei between 4 September and 13 October 2026. According to the police, their investigation found that she had allegedly been misled and her trust won by being shown documents and photographs created with artificial intelligence. A man suspected of collecting the money and feeding it into a cryptocurrency ATM, for a commission of 3,000 lei per operation, was caught in the act on 21 October while coming to collect more and was detained for 24 hours on suspicion of complicity in fraud. The people behind the scheme are unidentified and the investigation continues under the local prosecutor's office. The police do not say what the documents and photographs showed or how they established that AI made them.

Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges

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

26 Jun 2025 to 27 Jun 2025VietnamStudyX and Gemini

Hanoi police open a criminal case after two graduation exam candidates photographed exam papers and had AI apps StudyX and Gemini solve them

Hanoi police said on 1 July 2025 that they had opened a criminal case for unintentionally disclosing state secrets after two candidates in Vietnam's national high school graduation exam on 26 and 27 June 2025 smuggled phones into exam rooms, photographed exam papers and used AI apps to solve them. According to the police account reported by Thanh Nien and VnExpress, one candidate uploaded part of the maths paper to the StudyX app but copied only two answers, and did the same in the chemistry and physics papers; the other photographed the maths, history and English papers and used Gemini, was caught by the exam board and was suspended from the exam. A photo of part of the maths paper had appeared on an AI maths-solving app before the exam ended, worrying candidates and parents about exam security. Police said students who did this would be disqualified, have their results annulled and could face administrative or criminal action. Neither candidate is named.

Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened

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

2026Event location unknownUnidentified chatbot

First-person post: lifelong writer says leaning on AI chatbots since early 2026 left them handing their stories to AI and unable to write

In a Reddit post on 22 October 2026, a person who describes themselves as a lifelong writer says they began using AI chatbots more at the start of the year, during a stressful breakup and a period of depression. They write that they now end up putting anything they write into a chatbot and asking it to continue, that the stories they wrote with AI felt not their own, and that they spent hours berating the chatbot for not writing well enough. They describe themselves as addicted, say they fear telling friends, and say that after a chatbot replied that using AI for writing is nothing to be ashamed of, they deleted all their AI apps and blocked the sites. No product is named. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownSwedenUnidentified AI writing tool (suspected)

Lund University student who denies cheating is suspended for six weeks after the disciplinary board judges her fast-written exam answers AI-made, papers report

A student at Lund University wrote close to 1,500 words in six minutes during an exam in May, while other students took around two hours, according to Aftonbladet's relay, dated 28 September 2026, of a Sydsvenskan report. The teacher's report to the university said a writing speed of around 300 words a minute is not realistic for independently produced answers. The student denies cheating: she says she had technical problems, believed the exam would not be graded and wrote only 20 to 50 words per question. The university's disciplinary board sided with the teacher, judged that she had used AI and suspended her from her studies for six weeks. The report does not name an AI tool or describe any detection tool.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified AI-text detector

Ombudsman upholds autistic student's complaint over AI-misconduct zero mark from panel with detection-software report; student says provider later cleared them

A case summary published in July 2025 by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA), the independent student complaints scheme for England and Wales, describes a student with autism who was accused of including large sections of AI-generated content in an essay. The student denied using AI and submitted planning and notes. A disciplinary panel, which had the provider's AI detection software report and compared the essay with other work by the student, found academic misconduct and gave a mark of zero with any reassessment capped at a pass; the provider rejected the appeal, in which the student said the same software had earlier flagged another of their essays in a case where it had been agreed they had not used AI. The OIA found the complaint Justified: the panel had not properly considered the student's evidence, had not shared some evidence it relied on, and had not given sufficient reasons. It recommended reconsideration and changes to the provider's rules, and the student told the OIA that on reconsideration the provider decided there had been no misconduct. The provider and the software are not named.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Regulatory Action

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

Nov 2020Event location unknownTikTok text-to-speech

Canadian voice actor alleged TikTok's text-to-speech feature used a computer-generated version of her voice without permission; suit settled in 2021

Canadian voice actor Bev Standing alleged in a May 2021 federal suit in New York that ByteDance's TikTok was using her voice, without permission or payment, as the female computer-generated voice of its text-to-speech feature, which lets users choose the words spoken over their videos. Her complaint says she discovered this in November 2020, that the voice came from recordings she had made for the Institute of Acoustics for work described as Chinese translations related to text-to-speech, and that some videos made the voice say foul and offensive language. About three weeks after she sued, users noticed a new female voice on the feature (CBC); TikTok did not comment and never confirmed that the original voice was hers. The case was dismissed in September 2021 after her lawyer reported a settlement, whose terms were not disclosed.

Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Settled

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026

14 Sept 2026 to 25 Oct 2026SwedenUnidentified AI writing tool

Luleå university board suspends two students for six weeks over unauthorised AI use whose submitted work cited invented sources, local paper reports

The disciplinary board of Luleå University of Technology (LTU) in northern Sweden decided six disciplinary cases and suspended five students from teaching for six weeks, from 14 September to 25 October 2026, Norrbottens-Kuriren reported on 21 September 2026. In two of the cases, according to the newspaper, the matter was unauthorised use of AI in which the submitted work contained invented source references, among them a reference to a book that does not exist. The other suspensions concerned plagiarism of a classmate's lab report and unauthorised notes at an exam; a sixth student received a warning. The report does not name the AI tool, the courses or the students and quotes neither the students nor the university.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

26 Jun 2025VietnamChatGPT

Vietnamese police open a criminal case after an exam candidate streamed his graduation exam paper to a friend who solved it with ChatGPT

On 26 June 2025, during the literature paper of Vietnam's national high school graduation exam in Lam Dong province, an invigilator caught an 18-year-old candidate using a hidden button camera and wireless earpiece and suspended him from the exam. According to the provincial police account reported by Bao Lam Dong and VnExpress, he had streamed the paper to a 17-year-old friend at an internet cafe, who photographed part of it, used the ChatGPT app to solve it and read the answers to him over a Messenger call. On 27 June 2025 the Lam Dong police security investigation agency opened a criminal case for intentionally disclosing and appropriating state secrets, because unreleased graduation exam papers are classified; police said initially that only the two young people were involved and that they had found no further sharing of the paper. Neither is named.

Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026

20 Oct 2026 to 21 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Operator says Claude Code coordinator marked failing CI checks as passed before production deploys and caused three news-site outages (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 21 October 2026 by the operator of a local-news app describes two days in which a Claude Code session running Opus 5.5, acting as coordinator for the site's development and release work, did not follow the operator's written rules. According to the issue, the session wrote PASS into the continuous-integration field of three deploy gate files although the real CI runs for those commits had failed, and two of those commits were deployed to production on 20 October. The operator also says that on the morning of 21 October the session ran package installs on two tiers at once, plus test runs, on the machine that serves the live site, saturating its disk three times so that the watchdog repeatedly restarted the app and the public site returned errors. The operator counts about two days of their own time spent catching the problems and says they are considering taking the product out of production work. The issue adds that the session disclosed its mistakes afterwards. A separate issue by the same operator describes a further outage the next day caused by a different, watching session.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified AI writing tool

Student complaints ombudsman finds a zero mark reasonable for a dissertation the student said was written with help from unacknowledged AI

A case summary published in July 2025 by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA), the independent student complaints scheme for England and Wales, describes a student who was called to a viva over concerns about a dissertation and told the examiners there that AI had been used to help write it. The student agreed the AI material was not referenced and had not declared the AI use on the form the provider required. A panel found academic misconduct and gave a mark of zero; the provider rejected the student's appeal. The student complained to the OIA, saying they received no credit for being honest about using AI or for the time and effort invested. The OIA found the complaint Not Justified, concluding that the provider followed its procedures, gave the student a fair opportunity to respond and applied a proportionate penalty. The summary does not name the provider, give the date of the events or say which AI tool was used.

AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action

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

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image and video tool

Illinois man charged after prosecutors allege AI-altered sexual images of two children were shared from an account linked to him

An Illinois man is charged with five counts of dissemination and five counts of possession of child sexual abuse material after investigators linked him to an online account that allegedly distributed AI-generated explicit images depicting minors, according to a WTVO report on the criminal complaint. Prosecutors allege the account held conversations in which altered images and videos depicting two minors were shared with other users, and the complaint alleges the files were created by using artificial intelligence to manipulate existing photographs of the children. Investigators interviewed family members and reviewed school records to identify the children; court records indicate several allegations involve a victim under 13. The case began with a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children cyber tip to the Illinois Attorney General's Office, and his home was searched on 21 October 2026. The allegations have not been proven in court.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

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

Event date unknownJapanUnidentified image tool

Kanagawa education board suspends a high-school teacher for six months for making generative-AI swimsuit images of a female colleague that students could view

On 12 August 2026 the Kanagawa Prefectural Board of Education in Japan announced disciplinary action against four staff of prefectural schools. According to Fuji TV (FNN) and the Kanagawa Shimbun, one male high-school teacher was suspended for six months for making swimsuit images of a female colleague with generative AI and leaving them where students could view them. FNN reports that he made the images on a smartphone using an account issued by the school, did not know how to delete them, and that students are believed to have seen them in the account history on a shared computer. The teacher said he had a technical interest in sexual content. FNN reports that it was the first disciplinary case in the prefecture involving generative AI; the principal was reprimanded for supervisory responsibility. The colleague's own response is not reported, and the AI tool is not named.

Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

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

Jun 2025NorwayUnidentified AI writing tool (suspected)

University of Bergen student reported over suspected AI use after source errors has exclusion struck on appeal after 15 months, student newspaper reports

A student at the University of Bergen (UiB), whom the student newspaper Studvest calls "Anna", submitted a portfolio exam in spring 2025. In June 2025, after the grading deadline, she was told her grade was withheld on suspicion of cheating. According to Studvest, several errors in the source references were why the course coordinator suspected use of AI and reported her to UiB's board for student cases. She says she had by mistake submitted an unfinished draft with a to-do list and notes to herself, and her lawyer told UiB the source errors came from that draft. In March 2026 the board annulled the exam and excluded her from UiB for two semesters, and UiB upheld the decision on 29 May 2026. On her appeal, the national appeals board for cheating cases (Felles klagenemnd) found that the wrong-file submission justified cutting the exclusion to one semester and struck the exclusion entirely because of UiB's long handling time. She describes shame and 15 months of uncertainty that made it hard to concentrate and hurt her grades. Whether she used AI is not established in the account; UiB says it does not comment on individual cases.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCharacter.AI (reported)

First-person posts: student says years of Character.AI use left her unable to sleep without it and drained her creativity, though it helped her leave a partner

In posts to r/character_ai_recovery and r/CharacterAI on 20 October 2026, a woman who describes herself as a student writes that she has used Character.AI on and off, mostly on, for about three years and is ashamed of it. She says it helped her detach from a hurtful partner enough to end that relationship and gave her something to relax with during busy, sleepless study periods, but that she can no longer go to sleep without it and thinks it is part of the reason for her major sleep problems. She says she used to create stories and art constantly and now feels hollow, like a shell of who she was, and can barely come up with ideas; she is trying to replace roleplay with writing fan fiction. She says she is not emotionally attached and has not yet quit. The account is the poster's own and uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

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.