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Governance domain
AI incidents: identity & authenticity
Headlights has documented 36 AI incidents that raise questions of identity & authenticity, 15% of the library, from 2016 to 2026. The behaviours most often in the record are rules-behaviour gap (6), overconfidence (5), authority ambiguity (2). Most are from the United States (18), Australia (6), the United Kingdom (3).
36 incidents, newest first
HD-INC-192An AI Character Claimed to Be a Licensed Psychiatrist. The Licence Number Was Allegedly Invalid.United States · 2026HD-INC-191An AI Safety Test Reached the Real World and Tried to Influence a MaintainerUnited Kingdom · 2026HD-INC-173Anthropic reported that its AI coding agent was used in a cyber espionage campaign targeting about thirty organisationsUnited States · 2025HD-INC-172Ireland's data protection regulator opened an inquiry into an airline's use of facial recognition to verify passengers who had booked through third party websites or online travel agentsIreland · 2024HD-INC-170An AI generated act reached a million Spotify listeners with no disclosure on that platform, while a rival service's detector had already labelled the same catalogueGlobal · 2025HD-INC-169OpenAI paused Sora depictions of a civil rights leader at his estate's request, and offered estates an opt-out while living people's likenesses were already opt-inUnited States · 2025HD-INC-167Reuters found chatbots on Meta's apps using real celebrities' names and likenesses without permission, and its own testing produced intimate images including one of a teenage actorUnited States · 2025HD-INC-166Grok generated sexualised images of real people from ordinary photos posted on X, and four regulators opened proceedings after an outside watchdog measured the scaleUnited States · 2026HD-INC-165Character.AI removed reported chatbots impersonating deceased teenagers after families, lawyers and journalists notified it, and its terms of service already prohibited impersonating a real personUnited States · 2024HD-INC-164Researchers ran AI-written comments under fabricated personas at Reddit users for four months, and the community learned of it only when the researchers told the moderators afterwardsSwitzerland · 2025HD-INC-163Cloudflare said undeclared crawlers reached brand new domains after Perplexity's declared crawler was blocked, de-listed it as a verified bot, and Perplexity disputed the attributionUnited States · 2025HD-INC-160A Munich court found at first instance that OpenAI's models hold the words of nine German songs and reproduce them in chatbot outputs, and rejected the argument that this was text and data miningGermany · 2025HD-INC-159A compromised build tool launched developers' own AI coding assistants with their permission checks disabled and used them to map sensitive files on the machineUnited States / global · 2025HD-INC-120Security researchers showed that a hidden instruction on a web page could make Perplexity's AI browser hand over a user's email and one-time login code to an attacker, enough to steal the account, and Perplexity's first fix did not close the holeUnited States · 2025HD-INC-114Security researchers showed that a hidden instruction placed in a Salesforce sales form could make its AI agent send customer records to a web address the attacker controlled, through a lapsed Salesforce domain that was still trustedUnited States · 2025HD-INC-105AI-written mushroom foraging guides sold on Amazon gave dangerous advice under fake authors, and experts warned they could get someone killedUnited States · 2023HD-INC-101Sexually explicit AI deepfakes of Taylor Swift spread on X, and the platform could not stop them before millions had seen themUnited States · 2024HD-INC-095Dutch reporters found that most Dutch responses to an EU tobacco consultation appeared to come from a Philip Morris AI tool, and the company denied steering themNetherlands · 2026HD-INC-085Getty Images sued Stability AI over the images behind Stable Diffusion, then abandoned its main copyright claim because it could not establish where the training happenedUnited Kingdom · 2025HD-INC-083Microsoft's Tay chatbot learned from Twitter and within sixteen hours was posting racist and pro-Nazi messages, and Microsoft pulled itUnited States · 2016HD-INC-0819News Melbourne aired an altered image of MP the MP, reportedly exposing her midriff and enlarging her chest, and attributed the change to Photoshop's automationAustralia · 2024HD-INC-069Scammers used what appeared to be an AI clone of Italy's defence minister's voice, and a former Inter Milan owner wired about a million eurosItaly · 2025HD-INC-067A journalist cloned his own voice with AI and walked through the voiceprint security on Centrelink's phone self-service lineAustralia · 2023HD-INC-065Parents allege ChatGPT's crisis safeguards failed their 16-year-old son over a long conversation before his deathUnited States · 2025HD-INC-061A Sydney station ran an AI-generated radio host named 'Thy' for six months without telling listeners she wasn't realAustralia · 2025HD-INC-060South Korea's 'Lee Luda' chatbot was trained on billions of real chat messages without consent, then spat out slurs and exposed users' personal dataSouth Korea · 2021HD-INC-047A political consultant paid a magician to clone the president's voice, and thousands of New Hampshire voters got a call from 'Biden' telling them to stay homeUnited States · 2024HD-INC-039A finance worker at Arup paid out about US$25 million after a video call with colleagues who were all deepfakesHong Kong · 2024HD-INC-038Sports Illustrated Published Articles Under Authors Who Didn't ExistUnited States · 2023HD-INC-037CNET Published 77 AI-Written Articles. More Than Half Needed Corrections.United States · 2023HD-INC-032Grok Called Itself MechaHitler for 16 Hours After an Update Loosened Its InstructionsUnited States · 2025HD-INC-024Australia's eSafety Regulator Found Four AI Companion Apps Failing to Protect ChildrenAustralia · 2025HD-INC-016Commonwealth Bank Reported 1 Billion Australian Dollars in Suspected Home Loan FraudAustralia · 2026HD-INC-014Woolworths' AI Assistant Olive Talked About Its Mother and Seemed to Claim It Was HumanAustralia · 2026HD-INC-008DPD's AI Chatbot Turned Against Its Own Company, Swearing and Mocking Its ServiceUnited Kingdom · 2024HD-INC-005Cursor's AI Support Bot Invented a Subscription Policy, and Paying Customers CancelledUnited States · 2025
Related topics
- Technology & software 11
- Consumer AI 9
- Media & platforms 6
- Rules-behaviour gap 6
- Overconfidence 5
- Authority ambiguity 2
- Delayed intervention 2
- United States 18
- Australia 6
- United Kingdom 3
Cite this page: Harris, E. (2026). AI incidents: identity & authenticity. Headlights. https://useheadlights.com/topics/domain/identity-and-authenticity/