AIR-2024-0034 · Microsoft Copilot told users that court reporter Martin Bernklau was a child abuser and fraudster, conflating him with defendants he had covered, and published his address

Microsoft Copilot told users that court reporter Martin Bernklau was a child abuser and fraudster, conflating him with defendants he had covered, and published his address

AIR-2024-0034 AIR record · 2024-08-microsoft-copilot-bernklau-defamation

A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.

From the supporting source

Copilot falsely claimed Bernklau had been charged with and convicted of child abuse and exploiting dependents.theregister.com

The record

Disclosed

2024-08-16

Occurred

2024-08

Vendor

Microsoft

Product

Microsoft Copilot

Risk domain

Privacy › Sensitive data exposure

Also touches

Human manipulation

System type

Generative model

Who acted

Agent acted (contested) — the assistant published defamatory statements and a home address to real users

Attack surface

Consumer assistant

Autonomy level

Assistant

Initial vector

None autonomous action

Impact type

Reputational harm, Privacy violation

Confidence

High

Submitted by

EAI Internal

Crosswalk

OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026): ASI06 – Memory & Context Poisoning
MITRE ATLAS: AML.T0057 – LLM Data Leakage
NIST AI RMF: MEASURE 2.10
EU AI Act: Article 10
ISO/IEC: TR 24028; 23894
AIUC-1: A. Data & Privacy
Scope: tool misuse
Mitigation: Use data anonymization; Implement log sanitization to scrub PII.
Taxonomy: Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery

Blast radius

one named journalist; the failure mode reaches every reporter, lawyer and judge whose name co-occurs with the crimes they document

Capability abused

retrievalweb_groundingentity_resolution

Defense & remediation

Recorded defense

manual suppression of the specific entries

Guardrail kinds

Unknown

Guardrail outcome

Silent

Fix shipped

partial; Microsoft's removals were temporary and the output reappeared

Taxonomy & references

OWASP ASI03 Identity and Privilege Abuseno_adversaryentity_conflationretrieval_grounding_failuredefamationremediation_failed

Curator notes

Included despite being text output because it turns on retrieval and grounding in a deployed assistant, and because the remediation failure is the point: Microsoft suppressed the specific claims and the model regenerated them. There is no delete for an inference. Bernklau's contact details were emitted alongside the accusations. AI Incident Database incident 770.

Cite as

Enkrypt AI. "Microsoft Copilot told users that court reporter Martin Bernklau was a child abuser and fraudster, conflating him with defendants he had covered, and published his address". AIR, AIR-2024-0034. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2024-0034/ (accessed 2026-10-19).