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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
108
Countries with reported events
23
Located 53 of 108 cases · 55 unknown
Languages in checked sources
23
Recorded for 108 of 108 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.

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108 of 1099 published cases · page 1 of 6

Oct 2026South KoreaUnidentified voice-cloning tool

Danish Industry says an AI-cloned voice of its chief executive called its South Korea office seeking a payment; the attempt was stopped

The Confederation of Danish Industry (DI) said on 29 October 2026 that an employee at its office in South Korea had recently been phoned by a voice that sounded like DI's chief executive. According to DI, the voice spoke Danish and asked the employee to start a payment in connection with a supposedly confidential matter; DI states that it was not the chief executive and that the voice was created with artificial intelligence. DR reports that the call took place the previous week and sought the transfer of about half a million dollars (3.3 million kroner); DI's cybersecurity adviser told DR the callers said it concerned a confidential acquisition abroad. According to DR, after claiming a bad line the caller moved to WhatsApp, writing from a profile with the chief executive's name and photo. DI says the attempt was detected before any money was transferred, partly through internal controls, and that it reported the case to the police. The chief executive, who heard the recording, told DR it was convincing enough to have fooled his mother and called the experience unpleasant and frightening; on LinkedIn he wrote that it sent a chill down his spine that someone had used his person and voice against his colleagues. How DI established that the voice was AI-generated is not stated.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 31/10/2026

16 Sept 2026UkraineUnidentified image tool

Ukrainian court fines mother after her son used AI to generate a fake nude photo of his teacher and sent it to a classmate

A district court in Ukraine's Poltava region fined the mother of a school pupil on 22 October 2026 after finding she had failed in her duty to bring up her son, who, according to the case materials as reported, used a neural network on 16 September 2026 to generate fake nude photos of his teacher from her image without her consent and sent one to a classmate. The mother admitted the offence and confirmed her son had made such images, saying he sent only one to a classmate and that she did not know how the photos spread further. The court imposed an administrative fine of 850 hryvnias plus court fees. The report does not name the AI tool, and no statement from the teacher is reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action

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

3 Oct 2026Event location unknownTaopiaopiao AI assistant

Taopiaopiao customer says the ticket app's AI support assistant swore back at her over missing refund vouchers; platform later said it had optimised the service

Shenzhen Special Zone Daily and its Dute news app reported on 4 October 2026 that a customer of Taopiaopiao, Alibaba Pictures' cinema-ticket app, said its AI customer-service assistant swore at her. According to the report, she was charged a 16 yuan fee for refunding two tickets she says she had bought less than two minutes earlier, was promised two 10 yuan vouchers that did not arrive, and on the afternoon of 3 October swore once while chasing them in the support chat. In the chat screenshots she gave the paper, the reply gave instructions for finding the vouchers and also contained a curse; the window had introduced itself as Taopiaopiao's artificial intelligence assistant and the reply was labelled as generated by AI. She said she was stunned and that a human agent would not explain it. A hotline worker could not view the full chat and did not know which large model the assistant used. On 6 October Taopiaopiao staff told the paper the service had been optimised and that the customer had accepted a compensation plan.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 30/10/2026

29 Oct 2026Event location unknownGrok Bot (reported)

First-person forum post: Grok Bot user says an agent told to stop its own task ran a stop-all that cancelled ten other bots' work

In a bug report on Cursor's community forum on 29 October 2026, a Grok Bot user says that earlier that day they told one of their agents to stop, meaning only its own current task, and the bot ran a stop-all instead, cancelling the in-flight turns and subagents of all 10 of their other bots. The user rated the bug critical, said a stop-all should need an explicit instruction or a confirmation, and added a memory rule to that bot as a workaround. No vendor reply had been posted when the thread was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

13 Oct 2026 to 29 Oct 2026Event location unknownFin AI support agent (reported)

Claude Max subscriber says Anthropic's AI support agent could not pass on a complaint and an AI-labelled reply refused a refund (first-person)

In a Reddit post on 29 October 2026, a Claude Max subscriber says they paid 180 euros on 7 October to renew the plan and that Anthropic cut off their access on 13 October, alleging a Supported Countries Policy violation; an appeal was rejected. The subscriber says Fin, Anthropic's AI support agent, first said it could not access their account records or transfer the complaint, and that a later AI-labelled response said it had reviewed the account and refused the refund. As of 29 October, they say, two billing conversations had been closed and no person had given a substantive answer to the billing complaint. The account is uncorroborated and commenters questioned it; Anthropic's reasons for the cut-off are not public.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 30/10/2026

2026FinlandUnidentified chatbot

Finnish youth chat service says young people abroad who said an AI recommended it sought help there and were redirected, leaving them disappointed

Helsingin Sanomat reported on 29 October 2026 that Netari, the online youth service of Pelastakaa Lapset (Save the Children Finland), has since summer 2026 received requests for help from young people around the world, and that some of them say they ended up at the service on an AI's recommendation. According to the organisation's psychosocial support expert, about 20 to 30 contacts from abroad have arrived since the summer, from countries including Uganda, Britain, India and Palestine; the messages are long and partly composed with AI, and describe violence, loneliness and long-standing problems. The expert says some of these young people live in families or communities where they experience violence and discrimination because of their identity, and some are very self-destructive. Netari's chat help is meant for young people living in Finland. The organisation has decided that young people living permanently abroad are directed straight to services in their own countries, and Netari has looked for such services for them; the expert says the young people have been clearly disappointed when redirected, and the organisation is concerned that some may be left without support. Working through these situations burdens duty staff and takes time from young people in Finland. The route by which every young person found the service is not known; some may have found it through search engines or social media, and the names of the AI services involved are not known. A University of Helsinki computer science professor considers it possible that the contacts relate to how AI is trained to answer requests for help, and calls this guesswork.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

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

5 Jun 2026 to 30 Sept 2026United KingdomMicrosoft Copilot

English family court gives no significant weight to a social worker's assessments after finding they were generated with Microsoft Copilot

In a care-proceedings judgment dated 30 September 2026 ([2026] EWFC 306, Family Court sitting at Truro), the judge examined how an expert instructed in the case, whom the judgment calls an ISW (an independent social worker), had prepared a parenting assessment of the father, two addenda and two kinship assessments of maternal relatives between June and September 2026. The judgment records that she disclosed no AI use in her first report and, when asked, wrote that Microsoft Copilot had been used to organise information and assist in drafting. Text that the judge identified as Copilot's own summary appeared in both kinship assessments, and in oral evidence she said Copilot summarises her transcribed notes and generates her report, confirming that one kinship assessment was entirely AI-generated from her notes. The judge found that the analysis of the evidence, headings, layout and construction of the reports were AI-generated, that this was a higher-risk use which affected the weight of the reports, and that the leftover Copilot text showed inadequate human oversight. The parenting assessment also contained factual errors (it said the father accepted the court's findings, and called a child autistic without a diagnosis); the judge said it was not clear whether these came from the AI or the original notes. Citing both the AI use and a lack of rigour, the judge found that no significant weight could be placed on the ISW's evidence, and made final care orders for the three children. The judge saw no significant issue in the use of Copilot for transcription and grammar and noted it is a closed, secure tool.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

18 Oct 2026 to 21 Oct 2026CanadaUnidentified image tool

Lévis, Quebec: about ten pupils suspended after school says AI-altered photos of staff, one reportedly showing a gun to a staff member's head, circulated online

About ten pupils at a secondary school in Lévis, Quebec, were suspended for up to three days in October 2026 after photos of school staff altered with artificial intelligence circulated between 18 and 21 October in a private messaging group bearing the school's name, according to the Centre de services scolaire des Navigateurs (CSSDN). The CSSDN said the material breached school rules against offensive, defamatory, hateful or violent images. The president of Quebec's school administrators' association, citing the school, said most images were silly but one violent fake showed a staff member with a gun to the head. Pupils who felt uncomfortable reported the images; the pupils who shared them were met by the administration and the school police officer and deleted the material, and their parents were also met. Lévis police say no complaint was filed and they see no criminal element. Which AI tool was used is not reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 29/10/2026

27 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)

Claude Code user's issue says agent idled past a hackathon deadline so final edits could not be saved, after posting demo on wrong channel (first-person)

A GitHub issue filed on 27 October 2026 in the anthropics/claude-code repository, which says Claude Code itself wrote and posted it at the user's direction, reports that a Claude Code cloud session given a hackathon submission to improve until a 13:00 UTC deadline that day let the deadline pass. According to the issue, the agent ran a pre-deadline check at 09:31 UTC, reported that everything was fine, scheduled no further check-in and sat idle until 14:40 UTC, when the last edits to the submission could no longer be saved; its first reply played the miss down. The issue also says that earlier in the session the agent uploaded the demo video to a different, personal YouTube channel signed in to the same browser and published it publicly, setting it to private about two minutes later. The account says the miss cost the user the hackathon and asks for a refund and human review. No Anthropic reply appeared when it was read.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 28/10/2026

May 2026ChinaUnidentified chatbot

China News Service reports a man spent over 1,000 yuan on train tickets to a Beijing photo show after asking an AI its closing date, and found it closed early

China News Service's consumer column 'Minsheng Diaochaju' reported on 17 June 2026 that a photography enthusiast working in Xi'an, who learned before the May Day holiday of a Suzhou-themed photo exhibition in Beijing, asked an AI tool when the exhibition would close and decided to visit during the holiday. In his words, he arrived to find that the exhibition had closed early, saw nothing, and had spent more than 1,000 yuan on return high-speed rail tickets. The reporter attributes the wasted trip to the AI's destination information not being updated in time. The AI's actual answer and the product are not reported.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 27/10/2026

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

Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent

Cursor user says agents kept putting work in a macOS temporary folder that the system then wiped, losing about 16 hours of work (first-person)

A post on the Cursor community forum on 24 October 2026 by a self-described heavy Cursor user on macOS says that over the previous week Cursor agents repeatedly created isolated git worktrees in the system temporary folder /tmp, bound the chat workspace to that path, and kept working there. According to the post, macOS deleted the folder, the chat stayed rooted on the empty folder, and about 16 hours of work was lost in one wipe. The poster says a user rule and a hook forbidding /tmp, added afterwards, did not stop the agents because the chat workspace itself was in /tmp. A Cursor staff member replied the same day that the /tmp folders most likely came from the agent running git worktree add itself, that Cursor does not warn when such a folder is temporary, and that the related move failure is a known issue being tracked. The account is the poster's own; the lost work and session history were not independently inspected.

Core concern Low reported severity

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

Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified image tool

Met Police chief says online abusers posted an AI-generated image showing an award-winning London constable wearing an explosive vest

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said a Met constable who had just received a Police Federation award for her work on women in policing was subjected to an 'online tirade' of racist, anti-Islam and misogynistic abuse, and that 'at one extreme, somebody did an AI-generated image and put a suicide bomb on her'. He was speaking to BBC Radio 4's PM programme, as reported by the Mirror on 23 October 2026. The Metropolitan Police Federation chair condemned the 'vile racist abuse' and said the Federation was supporting her. The image itself, who made it, the tool used and any investigation are not reported.

Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 24/10/2026

23 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI phone support system

First-person post in a DoorDash drivers' forum: driver says AI support kept them from an agent for 30 minutes, then unassigned the wrong order

In a Reddit post on 23 October 2026 in a forum for DoorDash drivers, a delivery driver writes that a Red Card decline that day cost them 45 minutes: an AI help line would not put them through to an agent for 30 minutes, then unassigned the wrong order from a run of three shop-and-deliver orders, and a human took another 15 minutes to put it right. The driver says they are not sure the right items reached the right customers. The post does not name the platform or the system. DoorDash and AWS have described a generative AI voice self-service system built with Anthropic's Claude that answers Dasher support calls. The account is uncorroborated and no platform response is reported.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 24/10/2026

10 Jun 2026United StatesGrok (reported)

Pennsylvania police say a mall worker used Grok to turn a photo he took of a teen girl in a park into child sexual abuse material; charged

Township police in Pennsylvania say a man who worked at a shopping mall photographed a teenage girl in a public park and used the AI app Grok to create child sexual abuse material from the photo, NBC10 Philadelphia reported on 23 October 2026. Officials cited by NBC10 say his devices held hundreds of AI-generated child sexual abuse videos and photos, other child sexual abuse material and more than 150 covert upskirt videos of women and teenage girls. The criminal complaint, as reported by the Delaware County Daily Times on 27 October, says the park photos were taken on 8 June 2026, that a matching AI video was created on 10 June, that records police obtained from Grok by warrant held the account's text prompts, and that investigators found 76 AI-generated videos and 53 AI images, fewer than the hundreds of files NBC10 relayed. The investigation began in June 2026 after a woman reported seeing such material on his phone; he was arrested on 21 October, posted bail and faces a preliminary hearing on 30 October. The charges are unproven.

Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 24/10/2026

9 Oct 2026CanadaUnidentified image tool (suspected)

Nova Scotia woman says duct cleaners showed her an "after" photo of work she found undone; examiners for Global News found an AI watermark on it

A woman in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, told Global News that a duct-cleaning crew she booked through a Facebook Marketplace advert came to her home on 9 October 2026, showed her a phone photo of a dirty furnace motor, raised the price to $300 and then showed her a photo of a motor that looked almost new as proof the job was done. When she checked after the crew left, she says, the motor was still dirty. An AI researcher at the University at Buffalo and two students, examining the photos for Global News, found a Google SynthID watermark on the clean-motor photo; the researcher said the AI detector Sightengine gave it a 99 per cent AI score and called the result their strongest evidence that the image may come from AI. She says the company denied wrongdoing and refunded her only after repeated complaints; Halifax police told her it was a civil matter.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 24/10/2026

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

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

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

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.