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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
3
Countries with reported events
2
Located 3 of 3 cases · 0 unknown
Languages in checked sources
1
Recorded for 3 of 3 cases
0Core concern
AI communicated, acted for, depicted or impersonated 3Contextual 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.

1cases with a recorded lawsuit outcome 1cases with a recorded regulatory response 0cases involving minors

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

When events happened

0 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.

1 20191 20241 2026
Reported severity MediumLow
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3 of 936 published cases

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23 Feb 2024United KingdomMetropolitan Police live facial recognition

London: Met Police live facial recognition wrongly matched a man to his watchlisted brother; officers stopped him and he later received a settlement

On 23 February 2024 Shaun Thompson, a London community volunteer whom the 2026 judgment describes as 39, walked past a Metropolitan Police live facial recognition deployment near London Bridge station. The High Court records as not in dispute that the system detected a high level of facial similarity between images of him and the watchlist image of his brother, who was the subject of an outstanding arrest warrant, and generated an alert. According to the court's account, officers stopped, detained and questioned him and made him prove his identity, and when he declined to have his fingerprints taken he was threatened with arrest; he says the experience left him angry and distressed. Officers ended the engagement after checking police records about his brother, and he confirmed his identity with a passport photograph on his phone. Big Brother Watch, whose director was his co-claimant, says he was held for almost 30 minutes despite showing several identity documents. His judicial review claim about the stop, issued in May 2024, was withdrawn under a consent order agreed on 18 December 2024 on terms including a settlement sum paid to him. An amended challenge to the Met's revised live facial recognition policy of September 2024, brought with Big Brother Watch's director, was dismissed by the Divisional Court on 21 April 2026; the court said it was not judging the merits of the technology, and the claimants announced plans to appeal.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 26/10/2026

Dec 2019 to Jul 2020United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system

US: FTC says Rite Aid's facial recognition falsely matched shoppers to a watchlist, leading staff to search an 11-year-old girl and call police on a woman

In a complaint filed in federal court in Pennsylvania on 19 December 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission alleged that the pharmacy chain Rite Aid used facial recognition in its stores to match customers against a database of people it suspected of shoplifting or other wrongdoing, and that staff acted on the match alerts by following, searching, ejecting and publicly accusing customers and by calling the police. The FTC says many alerts were false positives: employees recorded thousands of false-positive alerts between December 2019 and July 2020, staff stopped and searched an 11-year-old girl on a false match, and employees called the police on a Black woman matched to an image of a white woman with blonde hair. Rite Aid agreed to a proposed order barring it from using facial recognition in retail stores for five years, without admitting or denying the allegations.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026

2026United KingdomFacewatch facial recognition

Chester: shopper told to leave a Home Bargains store as a shoplifter after being flagged on the Facewatch system, which Facewatch later said should not have held a record for the shopper

A 67-year-old shopper told the BBC and the Guardian that staff at a Home Bargains store in Chester told the shopper to leave in front of other people because the shopper had come up on the store's Facewatch system as a shoplifter. Facewatch later sent the shopper a photo with words saying items had been put into a bag and stolen. Facewatch said the shopper should not have been on its system and that the image and associated record were permanently removed. The Guardian reports that a subject access request showed the shopper had been incorrectly associated with a shoplifting incident on an earlier visit, and that Facewatch's chief executive attributed the three cases in the article, which include this shopper's, to human error in store processes. Home Bargains declined to comment. The shopper reports feeling physically sick and helpless. The Guardian reports that Home Bargains later offered an apology and a 100 pound voucher on condition of confidentiality, which the shopper declined. The year of the visit is inferred to be 2026 from the BBC report of 22 February 2026.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

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: 26/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.