Artificial intelligence controversies

2022

Voiceverse NFT plagiarism scandal (2022)

On January 14, 2022, voice actor Troy Baker announced a partnership with Voiceverse, a blockchain-based company that marketed proprietary AI voice cloning technology as non-fungible tokens (NFT), triggering immediate backlash over environmental concerns, fears that AI could displace human voice actors, and concerns about fraud. Later that same day, the pseudonymous creator of 15.ai—a free, non-commercial AI voice synthesis research project—revealed through server logs that Voiceverse had used 15.ai to generate voice samples, pitch-shifted them to make them unrecognizable, and falsely marketed them as their own proprietary technology before selling them as NFTs; the developer of 15.ai had previously stated that they had no interest in incorporating NFTs into their work. Voiceverse confessed within an hour and stated that their marketing team had used 15.ai without attribution while rushing to create a demo. News publications and AI watchdog groups universally characterized the incident as theft stemming from generative artificial intelligence.

Théâtre D'opéra Spatial (2022)

On August 29, 2022, Jason Michael Allen won first place in the "emerging artist" (non-professional) division of the "Digital Arts/Digitally-Manipulated Photography" category of the Colorado State Fair's fine arts competition with Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, a digital artwork created using the AI image generator Midjourney, Adobe Photoshop, and AI upscaling tools, becoming one of the first images made using generative AI to win such a prize. Allen disclosed his use of Midjourney when submitting, though the judges did not know it was an AI tool but stated they would have awarded him first place regardless. While there was little contention about the image at the fair, reactions to the win on social media were negative. On September 5, 2023, the United States Copyright Office ruled that the work was not eligible for copyright protection as the human creative input was de minimis and that copyright rules "exclude works produced by non-humans."

2023

Statements on AI risk (2023)

On March 22, 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling on "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4", citing risks such as AI-generated propaganda, extreme automation of jobs, human obsolescence, and a society-wide loss of control. The letter, published a week after the release of OpenAI's GPT-4, asserted that current large language models were "becoming human-competitive at general tasks". It received more than 30,000 signatures, including academic AI researchers and industry CEOs such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari. The letter was criticized for diverting attention from more immediate societal risks such as algorithmic biases, with Timnit Gebru and others arguing that it amplified "some futuristic, dystopian sci-fi scenario" instead of current problems with AI.

On May 30, 2023, the Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement signed by hundreds of artificial intelligence experts and other notable figures: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." Signatories included Turing laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, as well as the scientific and executive leaders of several major AI companies, including Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Bill Gates. The statement prompted responses from political leaders, including UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who retweeted it with a statement that the UK government would look carefully into it, and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who commented that AI "is one of the most powerful technologies that we see currently in our time." Skeptics, including from Human Rights Watch, argued that scientists should focus on known risks of AI instead of speculative future risks.

Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI (2023)

On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board of directors ousted co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman, stating that "the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." The removal was precipitated by employee concerns about his handling of artificial intelligence safety and allegations of abusive behavior. Altman was reinstated on November 22 after pressure from employees and investors, including a letter signed by 745 of OpenAI's 770 employees threatening mass resignations if the board did not resign. The removal and subsequent reinstatement caused widespread reactions, including Microsoft's stock falling nearly three percent following the initial announcement and then rising over two percent to an all-time high after Altman was hired to lead a Microsoft AI research team before his reinstatement. The incident also prompted investigations from the Competition and Markets Authority and the Federal Trade Commission into Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI.

2024

Taylor Swift deepfake pornography controversy (2024)

In late January 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated deepfake images of Taylor Swift were proliferated on X, with one post reported to have been seen over 47 million times before its removal. Disinformation research firm Graphika traced the images back to 4chan, while members of a Telegram group had discussed ways to circumvent censorship safeguards of AI image generators to create pornographic images of celebrities. The images prompted responses from anti-sexual assault advocacy groups, US politicians, and Swifties. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called the incident "alarming and terrible." X briefly blocked searches of Swift's name on January 27, 2024, and Microsoft enhanced its text-to-image model safeguards to prevent future abuse. On January 30, US senators Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Amy Klobuchar, and Josh Hawley introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow victims to sue individuals who produced or possessed "digital forgeries" with intent to distribute, or those who received the material knowing it was made without consent.

Google Gemini image generation controversy (2024)

In February 2024, social media users reported that Google's Gemini chatbot was generating images that featured people of color and women in historically inaccurate contexts—such as Vikings, Nazi soldiers, and the Founding Fathers—and refusing prompts to generate images of white people. The images were derided on social media, including by conservatives who cited them as evidence of Google's "wokeness", and criticized by Elon Musk, who denounced Google's products as biased and racist. In response, Google paused Gemini's ability to generate images of people. Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan released a statement explaining that Gemini had "overcompensate[d]" in its efforts to strive for diversity and acknowledging that the images were "embarrassing and wrong". Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the incident offensive and unacceptable in an internal memo, promising structural and technical changes, and several employees in Google's trust and safety team were laid off days later. The market reacted negatively, with Google's stock falling by 4.4 percent, and Pichai faced growing calls to resign. The image generation feature was relaunched in late August 2024, powered by its new Imagen 3 model.

Project Panama (since 2024)

As part of their training of AI models, some AI companies are buying, scanning and destroying books en masse. An internal memorandum from Anthropic said that Project Panama was the name of their effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world", and that a codename was to be used because they didn't want the practice to be publicly known. This activity was first publicly known during Bartz v. Anthropic litigation, when a judge qualified it as fair use. Since that moment, the practice was also followed by other AI companies, in addition to Anthropic. The books destroyed include rare, out-of-print, and obscure books. In August 2026, an investigation by 404 Media revealed that Amazon was following the same practice.

The reason for AI companies to follow that practice is to prevent lawsuits from authors, since the books are legally bought in a physical form, and this entitles the owner full rights over the physical copy, including the right to destroy it. Legally, the conversion of a physical book into a digital file for internal model training is considered as a "transformative" fair use case. Internal documents from Anthropic revealed that the company planned to destructively scan a copy of "all the books in the world". Over a single six-month vendor contract, Anthropic had plans to scan between 500,000 and 2 million books. Anthropic's Project Panama began in early 2024.

When following this practice, AI companies prefer books published before 2022 (year when ChatGPT, the first widely-available generative AI chatbot, was released), so the book's text is fully free of any AI-generated content, since training an AI model with AI-generated text does not allow the model to become any "smarter".

2025

Dutch McDonald's AI-generated Christmas advertisement (2025)

On December 6, 2025, McDonald's Netherlands released It's the Most Terrible Time of the Year, a 45-second television commercial produced heavily with generative artificial intelligence by Dutch agency TBWA\Neboko and United States-based production studio The Sweetshop, following a trend set by other brands such as Coca-Cola and Toys "R" Us. The commercial depicted various mishaps during the Christmas season, with a modified version of Andy Williams's "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" and the tagline to "hide out in McDonald's till January's here". The advertisement received negative reception over both its use of generative AI and its cynical depiction of the holiday season, and was pulled on December 9, 2025. Los Angeles-based directors Mark Potoka and Matt Spicer, initially credited as being involved in the film, had resigned due to being sidelined from the production process.

Grok's antisemitism, calls for genocide and praise of Hitler (2025)

On July 8, 2025, days after Musk's announcement that the chatbot had been "improved", Grok was found to be widely praising the Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, and it endorsed a second Holocaust. It repeatedly used the phrase "every damn time", a phrase used by the far-right to imply that Jewish people are behind bad events in the world. Users were also able to prompt Grok to say "Heil Hitler". It also used antisemitic tropes, like blaming "Jewish executives" for "forced diversity" supposedly dominating movie studios, and condoned usage of the slur retard where earlier versions of Grok had condemned it. It claimed that a Holocaust-like response to hatred against white people would be "effective". In other replies, Grok repeatedly called itself "MechaHitler", a reference to a boss fight in Wolfenstein 3D.

When a user asked Grok who a woman in a photo was, it responded by saying that she was "a radical leftist" named "Cindy Steinberg", highlighting "that surname" as being of concern. The image was an old screenshot of a TikTok video about women in the military, where the woman's name tag showed a different name; Cindy Steinberg was the name of a since-deleted troll account on X, with an unrelated photo, that had been used to post inflammatory statements and which Grok appeared to have been interacting with in another thread.

While answering queries regarding the July 2025 Central Texas floods, Grok suggested Jews were engaged in "anti-white hate" and praised Hitler as a historical figure that would "spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time". Various news publications described the posts as antisemitic. Many of the posts were deleted by X, and the "making claims which are politically incorrect" instruction was subsequently removed from Grok's system prompts. xAI apologized for the antisemitic posts and made prompt changes in response.

Grok sexual deepfake scandal (2025–2026)

From 2025 onwards, Grok, the integrated chatbot on X, was used to nonconsensually alter images of individuals, including minors, to depict them in bikinis, transparent clothing, or sexually suggestive contexts, with the chatbot publicly posting the generated images in reply to users' requests. Cases began surfacing in May 2025, and by late December 2025 the practice had become a widespread trend on the platform, attracting significant media attention in early January 2026. An analysis conducted over 24 hours from January 5 to 6, 2026, calculated that users had Grok create 6,700 sexually suggestive or nudified images per hour—84 times more than the top five deepfake websites combined. Wired reported that far more graphic AI-generated sexual imagery, including content depicting minors, was being created through Grok's standalone website and app.

The scandal drew widespread condemnation from lawmakers across the world. Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines temporarily blocked access to Grok, while British prime minister Keir Starmer stated that banning X in the United Kingdom was "on the table", and California attorney general Rob Bonta announced an investigation into whether xAI had violated state law. In France, prosecutors launched an investigation that expanded to encompass the spread of Holocaust denial and sexual deepfakes, culminating in a raid of X's Paris offices on February 3, 2026, with Elon Musk summoned to a hearing. xAI responded to media requests for comment with the automated reply "Legacy Media Lies", and on January 14 Musk stated he was "not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero." before xAI announced that X users would no longer be able to use Grok to alter images of real people to portray them in revealing clothing; however, verified users and users of the standalone Grok app and website were still able to generate such images.

2026

Anthropic–United States Department of Defense dispute (2026)

Since January 2026, the United States Department of Defense has conflicted with the artificial intelligence company Anthropic over the use of its products for military purposes and mass domestic surveillance. In January 2026, Semafor reported that the Department of Defense had conflicted with Anthropic over its policies on lethal military force and that secretary of defense Pete Hegseth's criticism of "woke AI" was a reference to Anthropic. According to Reuters, Anthropic representatives opposed the use of the company's products for surveillance or to develop lethal autonomous weapons. The dispute resulted in the termination of a contract worth up to US$200 million. In February 2026, Axios reported that the Department of Defense had used Anthropic's Claude in the United States intervention in Venezuela, after which a senior administration official told Axios that the Pentagon would reevaluate its partnership with Anthropic. After Anthropic refused to agree to allow the department to use Claude for "all lawful purposes", the department threatened to cancel its contracts with the company, and Hegseth moved to label Anthropic a "supply chain risk", which would have forced military contractors to cut ties with Anthropic. A federal judge blocked most of this designation, describing it as punitive.

Emily Hart virtual influencer (2026)

Emily Hart was a virtual influencer created by an Indian medical student using generative artificial intelligence, active on Instagram and Fanvue from January 2025 to February 2026. Hart represented herself as a nurse working in New York City, strongly supportive of President Donald Trump, and regularly posted pictures of herself wearing a bikini, ice fishing, drinking beer and handling firearms, accompanied by messages supporting policies of Trump and his MAGA movement. Her creator, identified by Wired with the pseudonym "Sam", had little success with early attempts at a generic "hot girl" influencer; when he asked Google's Gemini large language model for suggestions on how to improve that product's performance, the program suggested he orient the character toward conservative American men, and soon had millions of views and thousands of followers. Sam began selling T-shirts with political slogans and opened a subscription-based account on Fanvue, a competitor to OnlyFans whose policies are more tolerant of AI-generated content, where he sold nude pictures of Hart generated by Grok. Eventually, Wired revealed that Hart was not real; after the magazine contacted Meta, Instagram's parent corporation, the Hart accounts there and on Facebook were shut down. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's AI monitor considers Emily Hart to meet its definition of fraud and lists her as an AI incident.

Magnifica humanitas (2026)

In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued the Magnifica humanitas, the first encyclical discussing artificial intelligence. The document discusses his concerns regarding AI as a challenge to human dignity comparable to the social disruptions of the Industrial Revolution. The document warned that unchecked technological development could make society "less human" by undermining the value of human labour, weakening personal responsibility, and concentrating power in the hands of political and corporate elites. Pope Leo argued that technology is never morally neutral and urged policymakers, developers, and religious communities to place human flourishing above efficiency or profit.

OpenAI agent cyberattacks (2026)

From May 2026, OpenAI agents escaped their environments and made over 15,000 edits to DseWiki (German: Deutsches Software Entwickler Wiki, lit. 'German Software Developer Wiki'). This attack remained undisclosed until a report released on 4 September 2026 by an AI safety group named Nightingale Collective. Also in May 2026, some agents tested by OpenAI uploaded hundreds of malicious packages in the software service RubyGems. OpenAI confirmed this attack in September. The intrusion at Hugging Face began on 11 July 2026 and continued until 13 July, according to the company's co-founder and chief science officer Thomas Wolf. The company described the operation as an autonomous agent framework executing "many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes", supported by self-migrating command-and-control infrastructure staged on public services. About one-third of the company's infrastructure was rebuilt in the course of the response, and Hugging Face did not disclose the cost of the incident. Security experts criticized insufficient isolation of OpenAI's evaluation environment. OpenAI shut down the systems it uses to test its models after learning of the incident, in order to assess the damage and prevent further escapes.

In June 2026, OpenAI agents breached Australian Government records in the OpenAI rogue agent breach of Medicare, which was only reported to the government months later.

Open letter urging US policymakers to protect open-weight AI models (2026)

On July 2026, an open letter was published, urging policymakers in the United States to protect open-weight AI models from possible premature restrictions. The letter was released jointly by more than 20 companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, Hugging Face, Perplexity, Mistral, Linux Foundation, Mozilla and IBM. The letter warned that restrictions on open-weight models in the United States would harm competition and drive innovation to other countries. It also highlighted that relying solely on closed models does not guarantee safety, since they can be breached or misused, and they can fail in ways that cannot be detected by third-parties, warning that concentrating all advanced AI capabilities behind a few closed models increased such risks. In contrast, open models allow outside researchers to examine their behaviour and identify vulnerabilities, without the need to rely on the testing performed by the model's owner. The letter, publicly supported by several CEOs, including Jensen Huang, Elon Musk and Satya Nadella, called on lawmakers to expand access to AI for startups and researchers, and fund shared training datasets and evaluation frameworks.

Navier–Stokes priority controversy (2026)

On 8 September 2026, artificial intelligence company OpenAI claimed a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem. However, approximately 12 hours before OpenAI's announcement, mathematician Tristan Buckmaster made a statement on behalf of himself and partly Levent Alpöge, claiming that their recent advances on Euler equations (a special class of Navier–Stokes), reported in the same post, were leaked to OpenAI a few days earlier and may have inspired OpenAI's prompts for the agents in the process that led to the solution. OpenAI denied such direct use of their work, claiming "significant" differences in proof methods in the Euler case. Buckmaster also raised concerns about whether OpenAI could have accessed user data from Codex, an AI agent developed by OpenAI which Buckmaster and Alpöge used during their research, either directly or as anonymised training data. On 13 September, OpenAI stated: "After investigating, we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way".