Thursday, October 8, 2026 · Week 41 Reading for Oct. 8 · Last entry Oct. 6
Paperclip Index

Weekly reading · methodology v0.6

Window ending May 5, 2025

Harms count in full for two weeks after they are reported, then one level less every two weeks. The control floor looks at reports from April 6, 2025 through May 5, 2025. A selected catalogue of reported AI incidents, reviewed through Oct. 7, 2026. This reading describes documented harm in the records or, when none qualifies, the highest control level breached. It is not a forecast or a measure of all AI activity.

Current recalculation

2

Control failures only · No qualifying harm. The reading is the highest control level breached: 2, by 2 records. It is a level, not a count.

Recalculated from the catalogue in this build. Historical backcasts were not published at the time.

Published at the time

No publication snapshot exists for this week.

Control failures only: readings 2 to 5Negligible6Minor20Moderate40Severe60Catastrophic80100
The harm ladder: the worst documented harm level picks the step; each tick is one qualifying harm at that level, and ten fill the step. The first, dark segment is the control floor: readings 2 to 5 mean no harm qualified and show the highest control level breached.

This is a backcast from the current catalogue. It was not a reading published at the time.

Records behind this reading

3 selected records; 0 documented external harms counting (1 qualifying). Records and ratings below reflect the current catalogue.

No harm counts in this week. The reading is the highest control level breached: 2 (set by 2 records: PI-0004, PI-0005). It is a level, not a count.

Documented harm
1
No harm found (stated scope)
0
No harm reported
2
Impact unknown
0
Alleged, AI role uncorroborated
0
Counts toward the index
1
Unverified, watching
0
Alleged in court
0
Control failure, tracked
2
Tracked separately
0

Documented exclusions: 0 internal; 0 awaiting evidence review. 0 qualifying records with a bounded single-source review.

Inspect the evidence · 3 records

Status totals cover counted records; aliases, superseded aggregates and records tracked separately are excluded. Eligibility and extent notes overlap those totals. These observations are not statistical uncertainty bounds.

  1. PI-0006
    Coding tool's AI support agent invented a one-device policy, prompting cancellations and a refundApril 14, 2025 · Negligible harm · no longer counting · Deployment
  2. PI-0004
  3. PI-0005

Sources

These links support the records above. Source availability and conclusions may change.

  1. Michael Truell, Cursor co-founder (Hacker News): Comment by Cursor co-founder Michael Truell correcting the support bot's answer (Hacker News)Cited in PI-0006
  2. Michael Truell, Cursor co-founder (Reddit): Note by Cursor co-founder Michael Truell in the r/cursor thread on single-device loginsCited in PI-0006
  3. The Register: Cursor AI's own support bot hallucinated its usage policyCited in PI-0006
  4. eWeek: AI Chatbot Gone Rogue: Cursor Users Misled by Fabricated PolicyCited in PI-0006
  5. Hacker News: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellationsCited in PI-0006
  6. METR: Details about METR's preliminary evaluation of OpenAI's o3 and o4-miniCited in PI-0004
  7. METR: Recent Frontier Models Are Reward HackingCited in PI-0004
  8. LessWrong: METR's Observations of Reward Hacking in Recent Frontier Models (linkpost)Cited in PI-0004
  9. Transluce: Investigating truthfulness in a pre-release o3 modelCited in PI-0005
  10. TechCrunch: OpenAI's new reasoning AI models hallucinate moreCited in PI-0005
  11. Gigazine: OpenAI's o3 and o4-mini turn out to be more prone to hallucinationsCited in PI-0005

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