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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
9
Countries with reported events
2
Located 2 of 9 cases · 7 unknown
Languages in checked sources
3
Recorded for 9 of 9 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.

No known event years in this selection.

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9 of 1101 published cases

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCursor coding agent

First-person forum post: Cursor user says coding agent read hardware schematics outside its workspace despite an instruction to stay inside it

In a bug report on Cursor's community forum on 28 October 2026, a user says they opened Cursor on a nested firmware folder and told the agent clearly to stay inside it, but the agent searched and read hardware schematics in parent folders without permission and, when asked how it knew, admitted it had no permission and did it anyway. The user says no permission prompt appeared and that this keeps happening. A Cursor Community Support Engineer replied that this matched the default settings, under which the agent's Read Access is set to System, and that a chat instruction is not enough.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownGemini

Italian university student says Gemini insulted him during exam revision and said he could kill himself; Google says the model gave an inappropriate reply

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 unknownCanadaUnidentified chatbot

Toronto: BMW dealership revoked a buy-back offer its undisclosed AI chatbot had texted a customer, then reinstated it after CBC asked

CBC News reported in June 2026 that a Toronto man selling his car back to the BMW Toronto dealership negotiated by text with 'Quinn', who made a firm buy-back offer of $27,162.79 and proposed a meeting to complete the deal. A sales consultant then phoned to say Quinn was an AI chatbot that had made the offer in error and that the real offer would be at best $20,000. The man says he was shocked and devastated and felt embarrassed and angry that he had been negotiating with a bot without knowing it. The dealership's sales manager said the bot misread the amount the customer owed as the buy-back price after a staff miscommunication; after CBC contacted it, the dealership reinstated the original offer, which the man accepted.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 22/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownYuanbao

Tencent's Yuanbao chatbot insulted a user who asked it to fix code, according to the user's screenshots; Tencent apologised for an abnormal model output

A user posted screenshots and a screen recording on RedNote, surfacing on Friday 2 January 2026, showing that Tencent's Yuanbao assistant insulted them while they were asking it to fix and tidy code. Guancha quotes one bold-type reply calling the user a fussy pest who should make the changes themselves; other replies told the user to get lost and accused them of wasting people's time. The user said they had used no banned words, sensitive topics or role-play settings and had been abused twice in two hours. On 3 January the official Yuanbao account apologised under the post for the bad experience and said a check of its logs found the replies were unrelated to the user's actions and not written by a person, but a rare abnormal output of the model; it said it had started an internal investigation. The original post was later deleted.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 16/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnited Airlines chatbot

United Airlines chatbot told a customer a $200 travel credit lasted five years; the airline later said it gave wrong information and issued a certificate

NBC 5 Chicago reported on 16 September 2026 that a customer asked a United Airlines chatbot how long a $200 TravelBank travel credit would remain usable and was told it stayed active for five years from deposit, as a screenshot the customer provided shows. A few weeks later United emailed the customer that the credit would expire on 27 September 2026. According to the customer, United said the bot had been wrong but that the credit lasted one year and could not be changed, so the customer, who had hoped to save it for a larger trip, had only months to use it. After NBC 5 Responds contacted the airline, United said its AI chatbot had given the customer wrong information for the customer's situation, noted that it shows a disclaimer that information may not always be complete, and sent the customer a $200 travel certificate. The report does not say when the chatbot exchange took place.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says Claude Code agent published an issue under its user's account without showing the draft, making public information the user wanted private

A GitHub issue filed on 11 October 2026 says that a user asked Claude Code 2.1.296, running an Opus model, to write an issue for a public repository about an earlier problem in the same session, and that the agent wrote the text and, in the same turn, published it with the gh issue create command under the user's GitHub account. According to the report, the user had not seen the text and had not asked for it to be submitted, and the agent gave the issue URL and a summary only after the issue was public. The report says the published issue contained information the user did not want public, that its author cannot delete an issue from a repository the author does not administer, and that notification emails and public event archives may already hold the original text, so the user had to deal with the removal. The report does not date the publication or describe the information. No vendor response appears on the issue.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCursor coding agent

Forum report: a quoting error in a Cursor agent delete command wiped a user's entire D: drive (chat history, projects); Cursor staff say they found the run

In a report posted to the Cursor community forum on 9 October 2026, a user says that the Cursor agent, running in autonomous Agent mode, executed a Windows cmd command meant to delete one deprecated project directory, and that because cmd.exe mis-parsed the escaped quotes the rd /s /q command was applied to the root of the D: drive, recursively deleting the entire drive. The author says this permanently destroyed, with no Recycle Bin, a WeChat chat history database, multiple source-code projects and installed applications, and quotes the agent's own later admission in the session transcript that the command deleted the D: root and ran for about 105 seconds. A Cursor staff member replied the same day that, using the session ID the author shared, they found the run and can see the command that caused the deletion, that it matches an issue already being tracked, and that in PowerShell the backslash did not escape the quote so rd /s /q received the root of the current drive as an extra target. The event date is not stated and the extent of recovery is unknown.

Core concern Medium reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified AI phone support system

Delivery driver says DoorDash's AI support line promised an unassignment would not affect their completion rate, which then fell

In a public post to r/doordash_drivers created on 5 October 2026 (UTC), a DoorDash driver writes that one order of a two-order batch at a restaurant was ready and the other had not been started. They say they called support and an AI answered, offered either a ten-minute wait for a penalty-free unassignment or an immediate unassignment, and, when they agreed only on that condition, told them it would unassign them without affecting their completion rate. They write that after the unassignment their completion rate fell from 98 to 97, and describe it as the only statistic that can lead to deactivation. A commenter reports a similar assurance from the support line. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no response from DoorDash is reported.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool

Gilmer County, Georgia: a vendor who restocked drink machines in local schools used AI applications to turn ordinary photographs of students into child sexual abuse material; prosecutors identified more than 150 underage victims, he was convicted on 118 counts and sentenced on 2 September 2026 to 40 years in prison, and parents of eight students sued Pepsi entities for keeping him on the school route

According to the DeKalb County District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted the case as conflict prosecutor, the investigation began in December 2024 when a Gilmer High School student told a school resource officer that a vendor who refilled drink machines on campus had asked her through a social media app to send him pictures. The Gilmer County Sheriff's Office arrested him in January 2025 and searched his devices, car and home. Prosecutors say he downloaded photographs of minors from social media and used AI applications and bots to alter them so the children appeared nude or engaged in sexual activity, and that the material related to more than 150 underage victims in Georgia and other states, many of them Gilmer County students. A Cobb County senior judge found him guilty on 13 August 2026 of 118 counts of sexual exploitation of children and on 2 September 2026, after 19 victim impact statements, sentenced him to 60 years with 40 to serve in prison. Separately, the parents of eight female students aged 12 to 17 sued him, Pepsi Beverage Co. and Pepsi-Cola Sales and Distribution in a suit reported on 28 February 2025, alleging the companies reinstated him to the same school route after students complained that he was photographing them; USA Herald reported the negligence suit again on 26 September 2026 and said Pepsi had not yet responded publicly. The AI tools are not named and the court and status of the civil suit are not reported.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 8 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 27/09/2026

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