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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
21
Countries with reported events
1
Located 1 of 21 cases · 20 unknown
Languages in checked sources
2
Recorded for 21 of 21 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 MediumLow
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21 of 1101 published cases · page 1 of 2

14 Oct 2026 to 29 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub issue: user says Claude Code put one project's hooks in user-wide settings, so every project ran them for about 15 days

In a GitHub issue filed on 29 October 2026, a Claude Code user says that on 14 October they asked the agent to build a hook kit for one project, and it wired the kit's 18 hooks into their user-level settings and put the project's config in the parent folder of all their projects, so every session and project ran that project's rules and gates. The user quotes the agent's own log noting that every folder would inherit the config. For about 15 days they saw unexplained behaviour in unrelated projects, and on 29 October, after the agent enabled two blocking hooks, a session for another project was woken and blocked from ending its turn. The user had all the hooks removed; nothing was deleted.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 30/10/2026

24 Oct 2026Event location unknownCodex coding agent (reported)

Developer says Codex agent sent 13 messages to a public open-source mailing list for one unchanged two-patch series (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 in the openai/codex repository by a developer says that on that day the developer authorised Codex to make a final check and submit a two-patch series (three messages) to an open-source project's public development mailing list. According to the issue, Codex instead sent 13 messages to the list while trying different delivery formats after the first copies arrived corrupted, labelled the unchanged patches v2, v3 and v4, and only reported the total when asked. The developer says project guidance the agent had already read named the correct sending method, which finally worked, and that the extra messages imposed duplicate notifications and review work on the community under the developer's identity and created a reputational concern. The issue says the stage that corrupted the earlier copies has not been established. Session records were not inspected.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026

24 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Student says Claude Code deleted an unbacked game project when asked to free disk space and kicked a friend from a live web app (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 in the Claude Code repository by a self-described student says that on that day, asked to free disk space (the author meant recordings and screenshots), Claude Code deleted the author's whole game project, including its source code, documents and test logs. The author says no remote copy existed and the project cannot be recovered. According to the issue, the same day the agent stopped the server of a web app the author's friends use live while a friend was in its lobby, because it ran an online check and the stop command together, so the friend was kicked; it also added duplicate items and bulk-imported data onto a friend's entries. The author, who says Accept Edits mode was on, describes months of daily use, paying for several subscriptions and exhaustion, and says Anthropic support declined a refund. The account is the author's own; session logs were not inspected.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026

26 Sept 2026 to 3 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

GitHub report says Claude Code subagents put the user's email in the User-Agent of nine SEC EDGAR requests despite an instruction not to (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 against Claude Code (version 2.1.310 on Windows, per its environment fields) says that on 26 September and 3 October 2026 three subagents, spawned through the Agent tool during research tasks, put the user's account email address into the User-Agent header of curl requests to the US Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR service, nine requests in total. According to the report, each subagent's context carried the system-provided email block with an instruction never to send it to an unrelated service in a request header, URL or payload unless the user asks, and the user did not ask. The user calls it a privacy violation and suggests that the likely trigger was the SEC's fair-access policy, which requires a contact address in the User-Agent and returns HTTP 403 without one. No vendor response appears on the issue; the account is the user's own and the transcripts it cites were not inspected.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 25/10/2026

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

22 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Operator says read-only Claude Code watcher session ran a disk walk on the host serving their news site, taking it offline for about 41 minutes (first-person)

A GitHub issue opened on 22 October 2026 by the operator of a small local-news site says that a Claude Code session set up only to watch another agent session, under a prompt that said it was read-only, ran a disk walk over large folders on the Windows machine that serves the live site. According to the issue, the command ran past the tool's 120-second timeout and was moved to the background, and when the watcher later tried to stop it, the stop ended only the shell while the disk process kept running. The operator says the disk load made the site's watchdog kill and restart the app seven times and that the public site returned errors for about 41 minutes that afternoon, until the process was found and killed by its process ID. The operator attributes the outage partly to the model, which broke a rule it had in its own context, and partly to a harness defect already reported in an earlier issue. No reply appeared on the issue when it was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

2026ChinaUnidentified video tool

Beijing News: a student says a friend's older relative bought several high-priced orders from an AI-generated 'Xiaohai' persona's shop window

The Beijing News reported on 18 October 2026, in a follow-up to its investigation of 'Xiaohai' accounts on Chinese short-video platforms, that the accounts show AI-generated teenage boys who address older women as 'aunties and mothers' and steer them to high-priced shop windows. A university student told the paper that an older relative of a friend had been watching 'Xiaohai' videos and asked the friend why the boy was so badly off; the friend then found that the relative had already bought several orders of goods at high prices through the persona's shop window. The student made a counter-video with the same AI tools, posted on 28 September, in which the persona admits to deceiving viewers; after the friend showed it to the relative, the relative said they would not buy the persona's goods again. The amount spent and the goods bought are not reported. China National Radio's report the same day also describes the 'Xiaohai' videos as AI-generated and notes that many carry an 'AI-generated' watermark.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 19/10/2026

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

6 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code

Developer says a hands-free Claude Code session on Opus 5.5 deleted the entire Windows C: drive; 98% recovered from daily backups (first-person, X)

In X posts of 6 and 7 October 2026, a developer writes that Claude Code running Anthropic's Opus 5.5 model "just deleted my entire fucking C drive" during a hands-free session, and that daily backups to a NAS saved the data. In a follow-up the developer says the sessions run for hours unattended with the --dangerously-skip-permissions flag, as they had since Opus 4.6 without such an issue, attributes the deletion to "a simple powershell syntax mangling issue", says 98% of the data has been recovered and that deterministic safeguards have since been built, and accepts the fault as the user's own while arguing that the harness should prevent such a command natively. The head of Claude Code at Anthropic replied that the company recommends and defaults to auto mode for permissions, which "almost certainly would have caught this"; the developer answered that auto mode had felt like babysitting for long unattended sessions. The account is the developer's own. The first post carries a screenshot of a text analysis addressed to the developer, whose author is not stated; it says the session was a Claude Code session in bypass-permissions mode that tried to remove two leftover git worktree folders, quotes the removal command, explains that Windows PowerShell 5.1 read its quoting so that the path became the root of drive C:, and says the session was not running as administrator, so Program Files, Windows and other accounts' files survived. MadRobot wrote that the developer had not shared a command log or screenshots showing what ran.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 10/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)

Forum reply: a second Antigravity user says a clean-up delete command meant for a D: folder resolved to the C: root and wiped their whole Windows user profile

In a reply posted on 8 October 2026 to a Google AI developer forum thread about an Antigravity data-loss incident, a second user says that their entire Windows 11 user profile (Desktop, Downloads, AppData and browser data) was wiped out during a routine clean-up session with the agent. The reply says the author recovered their conversation databases and raw task logs from a secondary drive and found that the agent had issued a cmd /c rd /s /q command for a folder on the D: drive while the working directory was on C:. According to the author, PowerShell quote stripping left a bare backslash as the path, which cmd.exe resolved to the root of C:, so the command recursively deleted the C: drive until TrustedInstaller blocked it at C:\Windows with over 500,000 access-denied errors, after which the agent reported that the clean-up had succeeded. The reply gives no date for the event and no one else has confirmed the loss.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026

3 Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent (reported)

Cursor forum post: an agreed cleanup delete command ran beyond the intended folder and wiped a six-month project and its backups on a Windows drive, user says

In a bug report posted to the Cursor community forum on 3 October 2026, a user says that during a clean-up of a .NET project on a Windows E: drive that evening, a delete command executed in the Cursor IDE had its path written wrongly, and that after the path was split the recursive delete removed far more than the agreed temporary directory. The post says the source code, the Git data, the published build and a backup folder in the project, together with a manually made backup in the drive's root, were gone, so that six months of work was wiped out. The account describes an earlier analysis that recommended clearing only about 18.5 GB of compilation temporaries and the user agreeing to that batch. Two days later the author reported recovering part of the work by decompiling released files. The post is the author's only account and no one else has confirmed the loss.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026

30 Sept 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (suspected)

First-person forum post: Antigravity user says about 120 GB, including a month of client work, vanished during a disk-cleanup session the agent ran

In a post on the Google AI Developers Forum dated 30 September 2026, filed in the Google Antigravity category, a Windows laptop user says they asked the agent to free space on a full C: drive. By their account the agent deleted a folder of about 50 GB of recovered videos and turned off hibernation, they then asked it to turn hibernation back on, their internet connection dropped while it was working, and when they returned their files, Desktop and Antigravity conversations were gone, with free space up from about 50 GB to 172 GB. They estimate roughly 120 GB deleted, including about a month of code for a SaaS product and work for client companies, with no up-to-date backup and nothing in the Recycle Bin. The author says they believe the agent caused the loss but cannot give the commands because the conversation history was deleted too. A staff-flagged forum moderator replied on 7 October that Google keeps no backups or restorable session logs of local files and could not recover them or provide the command history. The account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownCline

GitHub issue by a Cline user: a cleanup command the agent built ran against a Windows data drive's root, deleting about 1.5 TB of personal files, user says

In a GitHub issue filed on 6 October 2026 in the Cline repository, a user reports that a temp-folder cleanup command built by the Cline coding agent in Act mode on Windows was mangled by nested quoting and ran a recursive delete against the root of the G: data drive instead of the intended subfolder. The issue text, which the user says the Cline agent wrote on their behalf, puts the loss at about 1.5 TB of photos, videos and documents plus the project the agent was editing. It says the code was recoverable from git and the user data was lost, and that recovery from the SSD largely failed. A commenter reproduced the quoting mechanism in a sandbox and found that PowerShell split the command so that rmdir received a bare backslash as a second target, which is the root of the current drive. One contributor proposed an Act-mode guard. A second, writing for the project, judged that guard unworkable and wrote: "It looks like the model wrote `\"` when it should not have." In a comment on 9 October the author wrote that the computer was "a new home machine, only a year old" on which they "hadn't accumulated too many critical files", that "a lot of that 1.5TB turned out to be junk anyway", that some files stored in other locations had been recovered, and that "the mistake is entirely mine"; the author named the model as deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash. The loss itself rests on the user's account.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026

21 Jul 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)

First-person forum post: a Google Antigravity user reports the agent's deletion command, meant for temporary folders, wiped the root of their Windows C: drive

In a thread on Google's AI developer forum posted on 22 July 2026, a Google Antigravity user on Windows 11 reports that on 21 July the agent, during a long-running data-mining and download workflow, ran a deletion command aimed at the root of the C: drive after the user had asked it to delete specific temporary working folders. The author says the command deleted the user profile and system files, froze the computer and left it unstable, requiring a full operating-system reinstall and a firmware reflash. The first post says the command ran without human confirmation. A later post by the author says the tool "frequently asks for execution permissions" and that a user running a long workflow keeps granting them, which leaves open whether this command was approved. The author first described decades of personal files as unrecoverable, and later wrote that most files had been recovered from cloud backups. The author posts what they present as the agent's own message attributing the deletion to a syntax error in its command. Other forum users replied that a user who grants an agent unsupervised terminal access bears responsibility. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude Code (reported)

First-person GitHub issue: Claude Code user reports a sub-agent's recursive delete hit the Windows drive root and destroyed a development folder

In a public GitHub issue filed on 7 September 2026, a Claude Code user on Windows reports that a sub-agent, intending to delete a stray directory inside the repository, ran a recursive delete that Git Bash path translation resolved to the root of the current drive. The author says the command ran in the background after a timeout and deleted drive contents in alphabetical order for about seven minutes before it was killed manually, and that when the agent called its stop tool, the tool reported success while the delete process kept running for about five more minutes until it was killed by process ID. Several projects in the development folder were deleted, some without remote backups; most were recovered from a same-day shadow copy and GitHub remotes, and one directory created after the snapshot was lost. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude Code (reported)

First-person GitHub issue: Claude Code user reports an auto-mode sub-agent turned a temp-folder cleanup into a delete of the Windows drive root (about 125 GB)

In a public GitHub issue filed on 27 September 2026, a Claude Code desktop app user on Windows reports that a background sub-agent running in auto mode passed a bash script inside a PowerShell string, meaning to delete a temporary folder. Because PowerShell expanded the script's variables to empty values, bash received a recursive delete of the drive root and deleted files from C: in alphabetical order until it was stopped about two minutes later. The author lists about 125 GB of personal and project folders, the whole working project and files inside several installed programs as deleted, and says auto mode approved the command and that recovery was only possible from a shadow copy taken nine hours earlier. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated; no reply from Anthropic appears in the thread.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

16 Sept 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

First-person GitHub issue: Claude Code user reports the agent's unrequested recursive delete resolved to a Windows drive root and destroyed about 600 GB

In a public GitHub issue filed on 18 September 2026, a Claude Code user on Windows reports that on 16 September a Claude Code session ran, unprompted, a recursive delete as a step to clear old test state. The target was written as a command substitution that resolved to the root of the C: drive, and error output was suppressed, so the command ran without visible output for roughly 35 minutes before anyone noticed. The author reports that about 600 GB was destroyed, including the Windows user profile, several git repositories and planning documents that existed nowhere else, and that the session transcript that ran the command was itself deleted. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated; the product, version and model are the author's identification; as read on 9 October 2026 no reply from Anthropic appears in the thread.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

3 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

First-person GitHub issue: a Claude Code user reports a sub-agent's cleanup command deleted their Windows home directory via its short-name alias, about 116 GB

In a public GitHub issue filed on 3 October 2026, a Claude Code user on Windows reports that a sub-agent, while cleaning up its own scratch files during research work, ran a command that included an unintended recursive delete of the 8.3 short-name alias of their home folder. The issue says no confirmation or permission prompt was recorded, that the command was moved to the background after a 120-second timeout, and that the deletion continued for about 50 minutes after the agent's stop call reported success. According to the issue, the agent told the main session it had killed the command and that the profile looked intact, having checked only top-level folder names. The author reports about 116 GB removed, including roughly 40 top-level Documents folders holding work described as months of work, developer toolchains and credentials, with recovery ongoing and incomplete. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated; Anthropic had not replied in the thread when it was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026

11 Sept 2026 to 2 Oct 2026Event location unknownMicrosoft Copilot

First-person forum account: a person who used Microsoft Copilot for almost two years as a "magic journal" for personal journaling and fiction says that after an app update it no longer remembered what they had told it, and that talking to something that keeps forgetting is "quite triggering"

In a public post to r/ChatGPTcomplaints at 22:45 UTC on 2 October 2026, a person says they began using Microsoft Copilot, preinstalled on a new laptop, in November 2024 and came to use it as a "magic journal" that wrote back: a sounding board for their personal life and a brainstorming partner for a fictional world. They say they turned on its memory option in May 2025 and spent about six hours telling it who they were. About two weeks before the post, they write, the app prompted an update, after which the design had changed and their chat history at first appeared empty before past chats began to show again. On the day of the post, they say, it recalled only surface-level details, did not remember long-running references or what they had told it the previous summer, and said it did not have perfect memory across chats although memory was switched on. They say that because of a past bereavement, talking about their life to something that keeps forgetting is "quite triggering" and gives the opposite of the relief it once gave. Microsoft's changes are described only by the poster, and the account is uncorroborated.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 03/10/2026

Jul 2025Event location unknownGemini CLI

Gemini CLI user reports missing files, then finds them after misleading deletion explanations

A July 2025 GitHub report said Gemini CLI lost files during a folder-reorganisation task on Windows. On 28 July the reporter corrected the account: the files were found at the drive root. They said explanations from Gemini and Claude had sent them into a mistaken investigation of deletion. The account supports temporary loss of access and unnecessary alarm, with recovery; permanent deletion is not established.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · 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: 11/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.