15 Sept 2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI tools
On 15 September 2025 Micha Kaufman, co-founder and chief executive of the online freelance marketplace Fiverr, sent staff a letter announcing what he called a painful reset to turn Fiverr into an AI-first company that is leaner and faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team and far fewer management layers. A company spokesperson told Reuters that Fiverr was laying off 30% of its workforce, and Reuters reported that the cuts would affect 250 employees; Fiverr had 762 employees at the end of 2024. The Israeli business paper Globes reported that most of the 250 employees who would lose their jobs were based in Israel. Reuters said it was not clear which kinds of jobs would be affected. Kaufman said the transformation would not affect business on the platform or harm its freelancers. No source names an AI tool that took over the dismissed employees' work.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 02/11/2026
2025FranceUnidentified AI translation tool
In a press release of 15 December 2025, the French literary translators' association ATLF and the collective En chair et en os said that over the previous weeks several dozen translators who worked regularly for Harlequin, the romance imprint of HarperCollins France, had received phone calls telling them their collaboration was ending and that their current contracts would be the last. According to the associations, an outside agency, Fluent Planet, would run the books through machine-translation software and recruit freelancers to post-edit the output, and the affected translators were offered only lower-paid post-editing work for the agency. 404 Media reported that HarperCollins said it would start translating Harlequin novels in France using AI. HarperCollins France disputed a full switch: it said no collection is translated by AI alone, spoke of tests against a background of falling sales. Fluent Planet said AI assists the translator. The associations describe a loss of regular income for people who had worked with the publisher for up to twenty years, without unemployment rights as self-employed authors.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 01/11/2026
29 Jan 2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI analysis system
Noticias Trabajo reports that a sugar company dismissed its laboratory manager on economic and organisational grounds on 29 January 2025. According to the report, the company cited multimillion-euro losses from a fall in sugar prices and a new model that replaced traditional laboratory analysis with artificial intelligence and remote sensing, which made the physical laboratory he ran unnecessary and led to its closure. He had first been moved to a technician post, which the company then also cut. He challenged the dismissal: the first-instance social court found that the company had calculated his severance on a shortened length of service and a lower daily salary, paying 6,427 euros instead of 8,556 euros, and declared the dismissal unfair. The High Court of Justice of Castilla y Leon (judgment 18/2026) upheld that ruling, finding the shortfall of almost 25% showed a conscious and deliberate intention to pay less. The report says the grounds for the dismissal were valid and that the ruling was not final.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 01/11/2026
Sept 2025RussiaUnidentified AI tools
A court in Moscow Region, Russia, ruled in favour of a programmer whose employer had disciplined him and ended his employment, according to court materials reported by TASS on 27 October 2026 and relayed by regional outlets. In court the company's representative said the programmer had performed his duties improperly and had abused artificial intelligence when doing work tasks, which the company said its analytical reports showed. The programmer said the employer had pressed him to leave from September 2025 after he refused to sign an agreement moving him to hourly pay, and that he faced five internal inspections and three disciplinary penalties he disputed. The court found that the employer had ignored his written explanations, partly upheld his claim, changed the recorded ground of dismissal to termination at the employee's initiative, adjusted the dismissal date, lifted the penalties and awarded him over 1.2 million roubles in average earnings for the period of forced absence, plus moral damages and costs.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/10/2026
23 Jun 2025NetherlandsChatGPT
On 23 June 2025 a recruitment agency summarily dismissed a recruitment consultant it had employed since January 2024, giving seven grounds in its dismissal letter. One ground, misuse of company resources and an integrity breach, concerned questions he had put to ChatGPT on his work laptop about how to obtain a severance payment from the employer: the employer said he made defamatory statements about it there and breached his duty of confidentiality with the information he entered. He did not dispute the queries. In a decision given on 27 February 2026, the sub-district judge of the Rechtbank Zeeland-West-Brabant ruled the dismissal invalid, because the employer had not established another ground and the seven grounds formed a single composite reason. On the ChatGPT ground the judge found that private use of the laptop had not been forbidden, that he had shared only information about his employment relationship and no company secrets, and that this was culpable to a limited extent. In a final decision of 22 May 2026 the court awarded him a transition payment of 2,976.04 euros gross, fixed damages of 4,565.70 euros gross and costs, but refused the 25,000 euros of fair compensation he sought, weighing his limited income loss and his own culpable conduct, which it listed as including his sharing of information about the employment relationship. His fixed-term contract would have ended on 1 August 2025, when he started a new job.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/10/2026
Jun 2025NorwayUnidentified AI writing tool (suspected)
A student at the University of Bergen (UiB), whom the student newspaper Studvest calls "Anna", submitted a portfolio exam in spring 2025. In June 2025, after the grading deadline, she was told her grade was withheld on suspicion of cheating. According to Studvest, several errors in the source references were why the course coordinator suspected use of AI and reported her to UiB's board for student cases. She says she had by mistake submitted an unfinished draft with a to-do list and notes to herself, and her lawyer told UiB the source errors came from that draft. In March 2026 the board annulled the exam and excluded her from UiB for two semesters, and UiB upheld the decision on 29 May 2026. On her appeal, the national appeals board for cheating cases (Felles klagenemnd) found that the wrong-file submission justified cutting the exclusion to one semester and struck the exclusion entirely because of UiB's long handling time. She describes shame and 15 months of uncertainty that made it hard to concentrate and hurt her grades. Whether she used AI is not established in the account; UiB says it does not comment on individual cases.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026
2025RussiaDeepSeek
A Moscow district court upheld an engineering company's dismissal of its head of sales for disclosing trade secrets, according to RAPSI and Pravo.ru reports of 27 July 2026. The grounds included uploading protected internal reports to the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, forwarding company documents to her personal email and disclosing strategic information to a supplier. The court held that uploading trade secrets to DeepSeek is in itself a disclosure. She had sought a dismissal by mutual agreement and a contractual severance payment of 5 million roubles. The court rejected both, annulled a separate reprimand and awarded her compensation for moral harm. The decision was not yet final.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 19/10/2026
11 Dec 2025NetherlandsUnidentified AI writing tool (suspected)
On 11 December 2025 an examination board at Maastricht University found that a European Law School student had committed fraud in a weekly assignment whose purpose was to find and correctly cite legal sources. The board said three of the four sources contained wrong journals, years, titles and page numbers, that the sources did not exist, and that the way they were included pointed to the use of AI; it concluded the student had made unauthorised use of AI. The sanction was a formal warning in the student's file, invalidation of all assessment components of the course and exclusion from the resit. The student argued that no technical analysis or AI-detection tool had been used, that she was never asked whether she had used AI, and that the errors came from completing the work in a hurry from memory and notes with a poor internet connection. The university's examination appeals board rejected her appeal on 5 March 2026, and on 12 August 2026 the Administrative Jurisdiction Division of the Council of State dismissed her further appeal and her claim for damages for reputational and psychological harm.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 16/10/2026
Jan 2025ChinaUnidentified AI quality-inspection tool
A technology company in Hangzhou, China, employed a worker to check the quality of answers produced by an AI large language model, at 25,000 yuan a month. In January 2025, citing the impact of AI technology on his project, it proposed moving him to an ordinary operations post at 15,000 yuan a month; when he did not agree, it notified him that his contract was terminated, according to a typical case released by the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court on 28 April 2026 and reported by Hangzhou media and China National Radio. China National Radio, citing CCTV News, reports that the company told him only at arbitration that after a technical upgrade AI could do his inspection work. A labour arbitration panel and then two levels of court in Hangzhou found the termination unlawful and ordered compensation of more than 260,000 yuan. The court said that introducing AI to stay competitive is not in itself the kind of major change in objective circumstances that makes an employment contract impossible to perform, and that the pay-cut offer was not a reasonable proposal. The worker told CCTV that he had not found a suitable new job since the termination.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 7 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 16/10/2026
31 Oct 2025SpainUnidentified AI design tool
A company that designs and manufactures industrial furnaces dismissed a mechanical draughtsman on 31 October 2025 for objective reasons, citing a fall in business and the introduction of new technologies in its engineering department, including a model-based-definition design method and artificial-intelligence tools. According to press reports of the judgment, the dismissal letter put the cost of the tool licences at 4,725 euros a year against his gross annual salary of 29,871 euros and argued that the saving exceeded 80%. The social section of the Tribunal de Instancia de Bilbao declared the dismissal unfair, finding that the company had proved neither its economic losses nor the real implementation of the tools: an employee trained on the new method testified that she had never worked with it, and an implementation report was dated June 2026, seven months after the dismissal. The company must choose between reinstating the worker and paying 12,330.56 euros in compensation, less the amount already paid; the court rejected his claims that the dismissal was void and for a higher job category. One outlet reports that four draughtsmen were dismissed in total. El Periódico, which reported the same judgment in August 2026, dates it to early June 2026 and quotes the dismissal letter's statement that the company had introduced new artificial-intelligence systems that automate technical tasks previously done by specialised staff. The judgment was not read, and whether it is final is not reported.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 16/10/2026
Apr 2025Puerto RicoUnidentified legal research tool (suspected)
In an antitrust lawsuit that the Puerto Rico Soccer League brought against FIFA, CONCACAF and Puerto Rican football officials, Chief U.S. District Judge Raúl Arias-Marxuach found dozens of inaccurate or nonexistent legal citations across four filings by the league's two attorneys. According to Law Commentary, he said the errors bore hallmarks of generative AI and found that the lawyers violated Rule 11 by failing to reasonably verify the authorities they cited. Lawyer Monthly reports that the sanctions were decided in April 2025 and that an order of 23 September 2025 set the penalty at $24,492.10, payable to FIFA and the other defendants. Both lawyers have denied using artificial intelligence. In an October 2026 filing FIFA asked the court to dismiss the league's remaining claim because the sanction had not been paid. The lawyers proposed paying $1,000 a month, cited financial difficulties and an injury one of them suffered in March 2026, and argued that dismissal would punish their client for penalties imposed on them personally. The court had not ruled on the dismissal request when these reports were published.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 13/10/2026
Aug 2025United KingdomUnidentified AI writing tool (suspected)
The BBC reported on 10 August 2026 that a University of St Andrews medical student received an academic misconduct alert in August of the previous year saying his dissertation had been flagged as AI-generated. According to the university, the dissertation was assessed by two human markers, one of whom raised concerns about possible AI use; the marker's notes, seen by the BBC, cite a polished, uniform tone, flawless grammar, formulaic paragraph structure and frequent dashes. The student says the link to his virtual hearing arrived five minutes after the start time. A week after the hearing the allegations were upheld, which capped his mark at a bare pass. The university accepted his appeal because of the late link, and at a second hearing in mid-November it did not uphold the allegations. He later received his full mark. The student says he was consumed by worries throughout that semester, that he deferred his exams and that his graduation was delayed until December. The university says the appeal succeeded solely on a procedural issue. The report describes no AI-detection tool, and the student says he did not use AI.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026
Jan 2025ItalyUnidentified customer-service AI tool
In January 2025 Maersk Italia, the Genoa-based Italian arm of the Danish logistics group, dismissed four employees of its Customer Service department without warning, according to the regional transport unions Filt Cgil, Fit Cisl and Uiltrasporti, who called a one-day strike. The unions said the company had moved the work to Manila and had also replaced part of the tasks done by the Genoa staff with artificial intelligence. One of the four, a woman, sued, while the other three accepted a severance offer. Euronews reported on 30 April 2026 that the Genoa labour court had ordered her reinstatement with compensation for the months she went unpaid, finding the dismissal unlawful because the employer had not tried to redeploy her within the company. A legal commentary in Domani gives the judgment's date as 30 March 2026, while Euronews says the decision came on Thursday, the eve of 1 May. The unions that backed the case described it as the first Italian case in which judges ruled on a dismissal linked to AI, although the Domani commentary also cites a Rome ruling of November 2025 on an AI-related dismissal. The Domani commentary does not name the employer. No source describes the AI system or what it did, and Maersk's account of the dismissals was not found.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 11/10/2026
1 Jul 2025 to 21 Aug 2025AustraliaCommonwealth Bank voice-bot
In late July 2025 the Commonwealth Bank of Australia confirmed to the ABC that it was cutting 45 call centre jobs after rolling out an AI chatbot, and ABC reports the bank had briefed the Finance Sector Union that the cuts were due to AI. The union raised a dispute at the Fair Work Commission and said members found call volumes rose after the bot was introduced. On 21 August 2025 ABC reported that the bank called the decision an error, apologised to the affected employees, said it had not adequately considered all relevant business considerations, and offered them the choice to keep their roles, be redeployed or leave. One employee told Yahoo Finance she had helped train a messaging bot known as Bumblebee, was told in late July her role was redundant, judged the redeployment offer unworkable and accepted voluntary redundancy. The bank's quoted statements say AI made customer help faster; the union calls AI a cover for cost cutting. At the bank's annual general meeting in October 2025, AAP reports, that employee confronted executives in front of shareholders and the chairman said the bank had made a mistake. In October 2026 The Sydney Morning Herald reported that, pressed by a senator at hearings of a federal parliamentary committee on AI, chief executive Matt Comyn owned the error in her case and said he had apologised for it in the past.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
2025Event location unknownUnidentified legal research tool
A Divisional Court judgment of 6 June 2025 ([2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin)) records that, in a commercial claim against a Qatari bank, correspondence and witness statements filed by the claimant and his solicitor relied on numerous authorities that a judicial assistant's schedule found to be fictitious or misquoted: 45 citations, 18 of which referred to cases that do not exist. The claimant's witness statement says the citations were generated using publicly available artificial intelligence tools, legal search engines and online sources. The solicitor's statement says he relied on the client's research without verifying it, that he had reported himself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority and that he had removed himself from all litigated matters. The court found a lamentable failure to check the material, accepted that the solicitor did not realise the citations were false, held that the threshold for contempt proceedings was not met, and said it would also refer him to the regulator. The judgment does not record any later disciplinary outcome.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026
5 Feb 2025DenmarkUnidentified chatbot
On 5 February 2025 a 22-year-old man struck his former father-in-law, 56, twice in the head with a rubber hammer in a car park in Ringsted, Denmark. Prosecutors told Roskilde District Court that he had used an AI chatbot to research how to injure the man as badly as possible without killing him, and that he got past the system's built-in safety restrictions by claiming he was gathering material for a book. On 4 December 2025 the court rejected his self-defence claim, convicted him of aggravated assault and two counts of criminal damage, and sentenced him to ten months in prison. No source names the AI system.
AI relation under review High reported severity Criminal Charges
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 05/09/2026
Jul 2025 to Aug 2025United StatesChatGPT
An officer’s affidavit records a husband’s account of two alleged poisoning incidents in North Carolina. Investigators allege that the accused used ChatGPT for related research. The chatbot’s replies and their influence on the alleged conduct were not established in the retained review.
AI relation under review High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/08/2026
21 Mar 2025IsraelChatGPT
A 16-year-old from Tira, Israel, used ChatGPT to explore ways to execute a terrorist attack and seek operational planning advice. Motivated as revenge for Operation Iron Swords, he armed himself with a knife, stormed the Tira police station, shouted 'Allahu Akbar,' and attempted to stab a Border Police officer. The attack was thwarted and he was apprehended.
AI relation under review High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 22/01/2026
20 May 2025FinlandChatGPT
A 16-year-old boy used ChatGPT to help write an attack manifesto with a 10-point attack sequence before stabbing three female students under age 15 at Vähäjärvi school in Pirkkala, Finland. The incident marked a critical inflection point in AI-facilitated violence, demonstrating how accessible AI tools can empower lone actors with violent misogynist ideologies.
AI relation under review Critical reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: credible · Causal attribution supported · Added 22/01/2026