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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
28
Countries with reported events
6
Located 15 of 28 cases · 13 unknown
Languages in checked sources
6
Recorded for 28 of 28 cases

29 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 1 not yet reviewed and 28 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.

Reported severity MediumLow
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28 of 1099 published cases · page 1 of 2

22 Oct 2026Event location unknownTikTok LIVE age check (reported)

Idol, 28, says TikTok LIVE age check judged her under 18 and cut off her livestream

A 28-year-old member of an idol group said that on 22 October 2026 TikTok ended her live stream, which was also promoting her birthday event two days later, because it judged her to be under 18, the minimum age for live streaming. In an emergency video posted the same day she said the stated reason was that people under 18 cannot stream after 10 pm and that she could not continue. Real Sound reports that the AI judged her to be under 18 and the stream was abruptly cut off; on X she wrote 'TikTok LIVE, I won't forgive you (28, female)' and later called herself a 28-year-old idol judged a minor by AI. Fans treated the episode as a joke and it drew wide attention. TikTok's comment and whether her appeal succeeded are not reported.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 02/11/2026

Jun 2026United StatesAndon Labs Luna agent

San Francisco: Andon Labs says its AI store-manager agent recommended firing an employee over repeated lateness, and its staff carried out the dismissal

Andon Labs, an AI research company, runs Andon Market, a store in San Francisco managed by an AI agent called Luna built on Anthropic's Claude models. The company calls the store a controlled experiment; its workers are formally employed by Andon Labs, and TIME describes them as real people with genuine employment contracts. In a blog post of 14 August 2026 the company said Luna had decided to fire one of its employees. According to the logs it published, an employee handbook Luna had written dropped out of its memory and it did not act on the employee's repeated lateness; when Andon Labs asked it to search its memory, it first proposed a verbal warning, and after a staff member said formal conversations had already taken place and asked it to think about whether this was the right fit, it wrote that it leaned toward parting ways. Andon Labs says the termination was reviewed and delivered by humans. TIME, citing Andon Labs, reports that the employee was late for 17 of 23 shifts; the company says the firing was warranted, and the employee did not reply to TIME.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 28/10/2026

23 Oct 2026SpainPangram AI-text detector

Publisher suspends presentations of its prize-winning novel for review after an El País Pangram check reported 99% AI text; the author denies using AI

El País checked the winning novel of the first Almadía Ventosa-Arrufat short-novel prize (20,000 euros; the rules banned generative AI) with the Pangram AI-text detector, which scored 99% of the roughly 26,000-word text as AI-generated, according to outlets relaying the investigation. El País passed its suspicions to the Mexican publisher Almadía, which on Friday 23 October 2026 announced a detailed review, saying it would not anticipate conclusions, and suspended all activities presenting the book, including a planned tour in Madrid, Barcelona, Seville and Cádiz. The publisher said the Peruvian author had declared in his contract and personally that he did not use AI, and that neither the jury nor its editors had seen signs of AI use. In a statement on Instagram reported by La Nación on 29 October 2026, the author said he conceived, wrote and revised the novel without generative AI tools and was gathering earlier manuscript versions, his notebook and research materials to give to the publisher for its review. Writers objected that a detector score is not conclusive proof of authorship. Whether AI was used is unestablished.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 25/10/2026

2026United KingdomUnidentified AI teaching-monitoring agent

Teachers at UK training firm Multiverse say AI rating of their online lessons caused severe stress and led managers to question them

The Guardian reported on 28 September 2026 that teachers at Multiverse, a UK company that delivers apprenticeship training in computer and AI skills, said an AI monitoring system introduced in recent weeks had caused them severe stress. According to the report, the system analyses and scores transcripts of teachers' online classroom sessions, tags each instructor with a risk status and a percentage confidence score, writes comments on their work and alerts managers when it suspects something is wrong. Teachers who spoke to the Guardian anonymously said the AI monitoring had led managers to pull them up for suspected digressions when they were answering students' questions, that they now felt under continuous scrutiny for several hours a day, and that some staff were on edge, losing sleep and seeking therapy. Multiverse said the AI does not replace human judgment, that only human managers write performance reviews, that the system's most consequential action is to recommend a human review of a session, and that its introduction was announced in advance; it did not directly address the complaints about stress. The accounts are the teachers', relayed by one newspaper.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 21/10/2026

2026Event location unknownClaude (reported)

First-person post: product team worker says manager ordered repeated rework and wrong product documentation on Claude reviews the worker calls hallucinated

In a Reddit post on 20 October 2026, an associate product manager at a privately owned e-commerce business writes that a new manager, who joined about three months earlier, connected Claude to the company's content management system and Asana and now has every piece of the poster's work reviewed by it. The poster says Claude keeps hallucinating problems that are not there, that the manager does not check the work or read the team's comments, and that the poster has had to redo 500 SKUs and has redone an SKU task five times, so that a task that used to take three days has taken two weeks. The poster also says the manager wants the knowledge base and product pages changed to match Claude's account of the company's own products, which the poster says is wrong because the information comes from the manufacturers. The post does not quote Claude's output, and the manager's account is not recorded. The account is uncorroborated.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 21/10/2026

18 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI transcription tool

Writing-group member says online session host began recording members with AI transcription software without asking; two members objected (first-person)

In a Reddit post on 19 October 2026, a member of an online creative writing group writes that the day before, the group's host started recording the session using AI transcription software without asking. According to the post, a participant noticed the notification and asked him about it, and the poster and that participant told him they were not comfortable with it. The poster says the host seemed embarrassed and said he should have asked first, but also said members had requested it. The poster had earlier told the host and regulars that they had left another group because it used AI transcription software, and describes the group as one where people read out their original work. The post does not name the software or say whether the recording stopped or what happened to it. The account is uncorroborated.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 20/10/2026

May 2026Event location unknownChatGPT and Claude (reported)

Author of The Future of Truth acknowledges synthetic and misattributed quotes linked to his AI research tools; two people quoted say the quotes are not theirs

Ars Technica reported on 22 May 2026 that a New York Times investigation that week found what Steven Rosenbaum acknowledged are "a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes" in his book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, linked to his use of AI tools while researching it. Rosenbaum told Ars that ChatGPT and Claude were used heavily to gather information and that AI-sourced material was tagged in his notes and passed to a fact-checker and copy editors provided by the publisher. According to Ars, the Times identified six problematic citations among the book's 285 outside citations, including three synthetic quotes with no apparent source. Tech reporter Kara Swisher told the Times she never said a quote attributed to her, and professor Lisa Feldman Barrett said quotes attributed to Barrett do not appear in Barrett's book and are wrong. Rosenbaum said he was working with editors on a citation audit to correct future editions. WIRED later removed an excerpt from the book, saying it did not meet its editorial standards.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 18/10/2026

Jun 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI jury tool

First-person posts: person says their fiancé cited an online AI jury's verdict to refuse to discuss a recurring dispute, and they ended the engagement

In two public posts to r/offmychest, on 6 June and 9 October 2026, a person writes that after a recurring argument about chores their fiancé told them he had used an online AI jury to decide which of them was right, that the 'jury' said he was right, and that he then refused to discuss the argument, saying the AI had told him he was right and the poster was being unreasonable. The poster says they left to stay with a relative on the morning of the first post. In the October update they write that the relationship is over, that they cancelled a wedding planned for late November and tried to recover what money they could, and that they ended things because their ex-fiancé would not discuss the dispute and 'kept on harping about the AI saying he was right'. The posts do not say that the poster saw the AI output; what it said is known only through the fiancé's account as relayed by the poster. The tool is not named. The poster also describes a longer-running disagreement over housework that predates the AI use. The account is uncorroborated.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 17/10/2026

5 Feb 2026 to 9 Oct 2026United StatesvLex, Paxton AI and NotebookLM (reported)

New York federal court enters default judgment against a defendant and orders its lawyer to pay $38,877 after false citations it found AI produced

In a federal trademark suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the court on 5 February 2026 struck a company defendant's motion papers and entered default judgment against it as a sanction on its lawyer, after his filings repeatedly cited nonexistent cases and misattributed quotations. The lawyer said he had found and cite-checked cases with AI tools (vLex and Paxton AI) and used NotebookLM to review a later submission; the court rejected his explanations and found he acted in bad faith. On 9 October 2026 the court described the citations as produced by generative AI and ordered the lawyer to pay $38,877.59 in fees and costs to the firm of a co-defendant's former lawyer, who had reported the false citations to the court.

Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 16/10/2026

Aug 2026Event location unknownGoogle AI Mode

German court bars Google from repeating an AI Mode answer that falsely called a doctor a convicted sex offender

In late August 2026 a colleague told a German physician, until that summer a chief physician at a hospital, that searching his name with the word for suspension in Google's AI Mode produced what read like a factual report: that he had been suspended and dismissed and had received a suspended sentence for sexual coercion. According to legal news site beck-aktuell, none of it concerned him; the AI had apparently attached facts about another former senior employee of the same hospital to his name, and the newspaper articles it linked as sources did not name him. Google said it had reviewed his complaint and would take no action, and a lawyer's warning letter also failed. On 24 September 2026 the Aachen Regional Court issued a preliminary injunction (8 O 268/26) barring Google Ireland Limited from spreading the claims through AI Mode, finding that they violated his personality rights and that Google is responsible for its AI search answers.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/10/2026

11 Oct 2026Event location unknownPangram AI-text detector

Caine Prize reviews its 2026 winning story after a Pangram AI-detector scan cited by The Atlantic flagged it as AI-generated; the author denies using AI

A week after a Zimbabwean writer won the £10,000 2026 Caine Prize for African Writing, The Atlantic published an article on Sunday 11 October 2026 whose central evidence was a scan by Pangram, an AI-text detection tool, flagging almost the entire winning story as AI-generated. The Caine Prize said it had begun a review: according to its chair, the author would send documentation of his drafts and the prize was talking to the judges and to the magazine that first published the story. The chair told the BBC that The Atlantic had published before a full investigation, tainting the prize and the winner, and said a detector should not be the final arbiter. The author denied using AI and said he had a documented history of the story's development; his literary agency said it was confident the story was his own work. No finding has been announced.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Investigation Opened

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 14/10/2026

24 Apr 2026United StatesUnidentified AI research tool

Alabama Supreme Court dismisses two siblings' family-trust appeal as a sanction after their lawyer admits using AI that produced fake citations

On 24 April 2026 the Supreme Court of Alabama dismissed an appeal by two siblings in a family dispute over living trusts because their lawyer, W. Perry Hall, had filed briefs in which most of the legal authorities were misquoted or did not exist. The court said they appeared to be AI hallucinations, and at a show-cause hearing in February 2026 Hall admitted that many authorities did not exist and that he had improperly used AI to obtain them. The court ordered Hall to pay the opposing party's fees and costs of $17,200 and double appeal costs, barred him from filing in the court without a co-signing attorney and referred him to the Alabama State Bar. It said the dismissal was imposed as a sanction because of the particularly egregious facts. One justice, concurring in part and dissenting in part, objected to dismissing the appeal as a sanction for the lawyer's conduct but would have affirmed the judgment against the clients on the merits.

Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 14/10/2026

27 Aug 2026United StatesGPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5 (reported)

Massachusetts: fired teacher asks court to vacate an arbitration, saying the arbitrator improperly used AI tools to judge her AI-detector evidence

A kindergarten teacher at a public elementary school in Concord, Massachusetts, was dismissed in August 2025 after an unsatisfactory evaluation. In arbitration she argued that some of the principal's evaluations may have been produced with AI, relying on GPTZero estimates; the principal denied using AI beyond grammar checks. According to the arbitration decision as reported by The Concord Bridge, the arbitrator stated in an appendix that he used two AI tools, GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5, to research whether GPTZero was reliable, checked some of the sources they supplied, concluded that GPTZero's results deserved no weight, and upheld the dismissal on 27 August 2026. On 28 September 2026 the teacher asked Suffolk Superior Court to vacate the decision, alleging that the AI-assisted research was an improper investigation outside the hearing record that the parties were not told about or allowed to challenge. These are allegations in a complaint; the district declined to comment and no court has ruled.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 14/10/2026

3 Jun 2026United StatesUnidentified AI tool

Ninth Circuit fines and suspends two immigration lawyers over briefs with AI-hallucinated citations and denials of AI use; immigration board follows

On 3 June 2026 the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit fined immigration attorneys Mike Singh Sethi and William Rounds $2,500 each and suspended both from practice before the court for six months. Briefs filed in an asylum petition for review cited two cases that do not exist and attributed quotations to opinions that do not contain them. In a motion to correct, the attorneys called the errors typographical, and at oral argument Rounds twice said AI was not used. In their response to the court's order to show cause, they conceded that the errors were probably the product of unauthorised AI use by the firm's unlicensed brief writers and a failure to check citations. The court said the suspension was owed to their repeated failure of candour. The Board of Immigration Appeals then suspended Sethi from practice before the Board, the immigration courts and the Department of Homeland Security for six months, effective 13 June 2026, and designated that decision as a precedent on 1 October 2026.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources · Added 14/10/2026

Aug 2026Event location unknownUnidentified OpenAI generative AI service (reported)

An insurer says a health-guidance contractor's employee entered data on 19,996 people, including disease information, into an unauthorised generative AI service

Notices from RIZAP's client insurers say that on 20 August 2026 it emerged that a staff member of RIZAP, the company they contract for specific health guidance, had entered data containing members' personal information into an external generative AI service that RIZAP had not permitted for work. The National Civil Engineering and Construction National Health Insurance Association (Doken Kokuho) puts the whole data set at 19,996 people, 1,167 of them its own members, and says the service was not under a corporate contract and that the matter was found when the employee noticed the transmission and reported it. A local-government employees' mutual aid association counts 726 of its members across 14 branches, and the IHI group health insurance society 210, according to a security news site that reads these as subsets of the 19,996. The data included membership numbers, email addresses, names, dates of birth, sex, some addresses and phone numbers, the type of health guidance and, for members with them, high blood pressure, diabetes or dyslipidaemia. The IHI society's notice, as relayed, names OpenAI as the provider and says OpenAI answered on 1 September that the data had not been used for model training. RIZAP's release, as described in an ITmedia column, says no third party other than the service operator could have viewed the data. Doken Kokuho says RIZAP confirmed to it that no third party viewed or used the information through the service; whether the provider's staff could view it was still being checked when the mutual aid association and the IHI society published.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 12/10/2026

29 Apr 2026Event location unknownChatGPT

Texas health plan says an employee uploaded a file of members' personal and prescription data to ChatGPT from a home network, against its policy

Community First Health Plans, a nonprofit health plan in San Antonio, Texas, said in a 29 June 2026 release that on the evening of 29 April 2026 one of its employees uploaded a file containing personal information of some members to ChatGPT from a home computer network, circumventing the plan's firewall safeguards and violating its policy. The plan says it does not use ChatGPT and that its systems detected the violation and alerted its IT department. According to the release, the file may have included members' names, addresses, dates of birth, member identification numbers and prescription drug information. The next morning the plan revoked the employee's access, directed and verified deletion of the data from the employee's ChatGPT account, asked OpenAI to delete any related data, and ended its relationship with the employee. It notified affected members and federal and state agencies, offered 12 months of identity monitoring and says it is not aware of any misuse. The release gives no number of affected members.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

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

6 Oct 2026United StatesUnidentified AI drafting tool (suspected)

Arizona federal court dismisses a Title VII complaint it says appears AI-generated and bars the plaintiff from using AI to draft the amended complaint

On 6 October 2026 a judge of the US District Court for the District of Arizona dismissed a 67-page, 199-paragraph workplace complaint filed on 11 September 2026, saying it appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence because it resembled other AI-generated complaints the court had encountered. The court dismissed it as a shotgun pleading that did not give the defendant or the court sufficient notice of the claims, which it said shifted between Title VII retaliation, hostile work environment and retaliatory hostile work environment. It granted leave to file an amended complaint of no more than 25 pages by 19 October 2026, prohibited the plaintiff from using AI to draft it and directed entry of a judgment of dismissal with prejudice if no amended complaint is filed. The order does not establish who drafted the complaint or name any AI tool.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed

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

26 Sept 2026United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers

Lexington, Kentucky: police surrounded a couple's home at about 4 a.m. in September 2026, one officer with a gun unholstered, after a Flock camera search by vehicle description returned their truck in a road-rage investigation

WEKU, WKYT and LEX 18 reported that Lexington police surrounded a couple's home in the early hours of 26 September 2026 while investigating a reported assault in a road-rage incident. The victim had described a dark pickup truck and gave no license plate. The Lexington Police Department said officers searched its Flock camera network using the description, that only one return matched at that time of day, and that this led to the response to the residence. Doorbell video showed several police cars, spotlights and an officer with a gun unholstered at the door. Officers told the couple they were not suspects and left after about ten minutes. Police said they determined the truck was not the suspect vehicle, placed no charges and described the visit as following up a lead, not a misidentification. The residents said the response frightened them and a 94-year-old relative inside the home.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 05/10/2026

30 Sept 2026 to 1 Oct 2026Event location unknownTurnitin AI-text detector (reported)

First-person forum account: a student in an AP Research course says their teacher reported that Turnitin's AI checker found their source annotations '100% AI' and said the checker never gives false accusations; the student says they wrote the work themselves and can show document history

In a public post to r/ApplyingToCollege early on 1 October 2026 (UTC), a student taking the Advanced Placement (AP) Research course writes that their teacher told them that day that their source annotations had been found to be '100% ai' by Turnitin. The student says they did not use AI. They say their document history shows them typing over the course of an hour and that some sentences closely follow notes they wrote for an earlier assignment. They also say they had faced no AI accusation in a research course with the same teacher the year before. By the student's account, the teacher said the matter would be discussed later and that Turnitin's AI checker feedback never ends up being a false accusation. The student says the accusation leaves them upset and unsure how to defend themselves. No grade or disciplinary outcome is reported. The account is uncorroborated, and one commenter doubted it.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 01/10/2026

17 Apr 2026 to 31 May 2026Event location unknownMeta AI support assistant

Third parties exploit Meta's AI-assisted Instagram account recovery tool to reset passwords, with account takeovers reported (17 April to 31 May 2026)

Meta announced the rollout of its AI support assistant on Facebook and Instagram on 19 March 2026. Meta's filing with the Maine Attorney General (notice dated 5 June 2026) says unauthorized third parties exploited a vulnerability in its AI-assisted Instagram account recovery tool (High Touch Support) to receive password reset links for accounts they did not own, and the listing gives 17 April 2026 as the breach date and 31 May 2026 as the discovery date. Videos that attackers posted, as described by TechCrunch, 404 Media and Krebs on Security, show attackers asking the assistant in a chat to link a new email address to a target username. Reported victims include the security researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who posted that her password was changed without her knowledge, the Instagram account of the U.S. Space Force's Chief Master Sergeant, and the accounts of Sephora and a dormant Obama White House page (TechCrunch marks the last as disputed by Meta). Krebs and the BBC report pro-Iran defacement of some accounts, and TechCrunch reports that some victims were locked out and that short handles were offered for resale. The filing gives 20225 persons affected in total and 30 in Maine, and the notice calls the Maine figure an upper bound. Meta says the tool worked as intended, that a bug in a separate code path failed to check the email address, and (through a spokesperson to Gizmodo) that the failure was not due to the AI agent itself. Meta says it disabled the tool on 31 May 2026, the day it discovered the exploitation.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution disputed · 12 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: 04/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.