Apr 2025Event location unknownGoogle AI Overviews
Italian outlets report that Google's AI Overview feature told searchers that Claudio Zorzi, head of orthopedics and traumatology at the IRCCS Sacro Cuore Don Calabria hospital in Negrar (Verona), had died. According to the hospital, the surgeon is alive and operating, and the error probably came from confusion with a general practitioner of the same name who died. The false news is reported to have circulated since April 2025 and to have recurred. Zorzi said he felt uncomfortable because people who think he is dead do not look for him, and he reported the notice to the postal police. On 15 October 2025 the hospital served Google, through its lawyers, with a formal cease-and-desist and default notice and reserved a damages claim. No Google response was found. The AI Overview output itself was not inspected.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
24 Oct 2025United KingdomMicrosoft Copilot (reported)
On 24 October 2025 West Midlands Police gave Birmingham City Council's Safety Advisory Group a written report that cited a Maccabi Tel Aviv v West Ham match on 9 November 2023 that never took place. The group had advised on 16 October that Aston Villa give no tickets to Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters for the 6 November 2025 match. In January 2026 the Chief Constable said the error arose from use of Microsoft Copilot, after earlier telling MPs it came from a Google search. The inspectorate found the ban advice predated the report and said confirmation bias influenced the force's assessments to the group. The sources do not show the Copilot output caused the ban.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 29/09/2026
20 Oct 2025United StatesOmnilert gun detection
On a Monday evening in October 2025 (20 October by the reports' weekday references) an AI gun detection system (Omnilert) used at Kenwood High School alerted on a student holding an empty bag of chips. Police responded and searched the student and found no weapon. The student told a local television station that officers made them kneel, handcuffed them and pointed a gun at them. The school district says its security department reviewed and canceled the alert after confirming there was no weapon, and a district spokesperson said the principal did not immediately realize the alert had been canceled. County councilmembers called for a review. No outcome of a review is established in the sources.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
12 Sept 2025United StatesGaggle school monitoring
According to a Volusia County Sheriff's Office account carried by local outlets, a 15-year-old high school student in Deltona, Florida was arrested on 12 September 2025 after typing a written threat to bring a gun to school on a school-issued laptop. The Gaggle student-monitoring software raised an alert that notified the school resource deputy, who detained the student before the student boarded the bus home. The student was arrested on a second-degree felony charge (one outlet says the charge was still to be filed). The student reportedly admitted typing the text, said it was not meant seriously and said the motive was anger about being picked on. Outcome of the charge and the exact Gaggle role in generating this alert are not reported.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
23 Jun 2021United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system
According to police and bank records reviewed by the Washington Post, in December 2019 a woman made fraudulent withdrawals at a SunTrust branch in Potomac, Maryland; branches in two other Maryland counties were also defrauded. A bank investigator posted the surveillance photos on CrimeDex, an online network of police and corporate investigators; an unknown respondent ran the image through facial-recognition software and returned Kimberlee Williams's name and photo, and the investigator told Montgomery County police that facial-recognition software had identified her. Police in Montgomery, Prince George's and Anne Arundel counties charged her in 2020 on the investigator's identification and their own visual comparison of photos (two departments also cited her old Oklahoma check-fraud convictions), without reported checks of her whereabouts; Montgomery County police did not disclose the facial-recognition search in the charging application, according to police records reviewed by the Washington Post and the ACLU. On 23 June 2021 she was arrested at the gate of Fort Sill near Lawton, Oklahoma, while accompanying her daughter on a DoorDash delivery, spent about three weeks in an Oklahoma jail, was flown to Maryland, and faced 16 charges including 12 felonies. The counties dismissed the charges one after another, in October and December 2021, after about six months in jail. Her daughter says she was depressed afterwards; the ACLU says the ordeal harmed her mental and physical health. On 14 April 2026 the ACLU and ACLU of Maryland sent complaint letters to the three departments seeking an apology and reforms.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 27/09/2026
Event date unknownBrazilUnidentified facial recognition system
The Espírito Santo Civil Police (Defa, the fraud and forgery unit) said a 27-year-old man was arrested on a warrant in Serra on 22 September 2026, suspected of defrauding a personal trainer of more than R$100,000. According to the police, the suspect offered a car in exchange for the victim's motorcycle; during the negotiation he persuaded the victim to perform a facial-recognition procedure, saying it was needed to transfer the car's ownership; the biometric was later used to contract a vehicle financing in the victim's name without his authorisation, and weeks after the exchange the victim discovered that the car he had received did not belong to the suspect and was a rental. The loss, combining the motorcycle and the fraudulently contracted financing, exceeded R$100,000. The suspect, who police say had been arrested in São Paulo in July 2025 in a 'love scam' case, was taken to the Centro de Triagem at the Rodrigo Figueiredo da Rosa prison complex and remains at the disposal of the courts. The financing provider and the facial-recognition system are not identified, and the reports do not say how the captured biometric was used to pass the financing.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 26/09/2026
14 Aug 2021 to 14 Mar 2024United StatesSt. Louis mugshot recognition (SMRT)
Christopher Gatlin was arrested on 14 August 2021 for an assault at the St. Charles Rock Road MetroLink station after a joint St. Louis County and city team uploaded a grainy, blurry surveillance photograph from a bus into the St. Louis Mugshot Recognition Technology System, a facial-recognition tool that searches stored mug shots (more than 500,000 uploaded, the suit says per the Post-Dispatch; more than 250,000 per Biometric Update via Hoodline), and built the investigation around the resulting match together with a witness identification; he was charged with first-degree assault and held roughly 17 months (the Post-Dispatch says almost two years), a county judge suppressed the witness identification as unconstitutionally suggestive, and prosecutors dismissed the charges on 14 March 2024 (Post-Dispatch; Hoodline citing Biometric Update; Bloomberg Law). Gatlin sued St. Louis County, the City of St. Louis and named officers in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri on 13 January 2025; on 15 October 2025 the court denied the city's motion to dismiss and granted a detective's motion only as to one count; on 13 August 2026 the court allowed a second amended complaint adding Amazon Web Services, which the complaint says supplied the Rekognition program the system used; the county, city and officers answered on 27 August 2026, AWS's response was extended to 21 September 2026 and on 17 September it moved for a further extension to 28 September (no ruling on the docket when read), and a jury trial is set for 1 November 2027 (CourtListener docket). Amazon told the Post-Dispatch that its terms of service prohibit the use of its facial recognition technology in criminal investigations and that it would fully investigate any information that emerges in the litigation. The ACLU lists Gatlin among fourteen people known to have been wrongfully arrested in the US because police relied on erroneous facial-recognition results.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 26/09/2026
24 Jul 2026 to 26 Jul 2026IndiaUnidentified facial recognition system
In an affidavit of 17 August 2026 before the Supreme Court of India, Delhi Police said its Facial Recognition System (FRS) had identified 2,873 people with criminal antecedents at the Jantar Mantar protests of 20 to 26 July 2026 (2,402 through its 'Crime Kundli' biometric database and 471 through other criminal records). On 1 September the Court quashed the FIRs against the student protesters but let the police proceed against the 2,873; the police say any action will follow field verification. The Indian Express checked the 205 listed people facing murder, attempted-murder, rape or child-sexual-offence charges against police, prison and court records and found that at least 25 of them (17 accused of murder, four of rape (two or three under POCSO; the Express's narrative and its list differ), four of attempted murder) were lodged in Delhi's Tihar, Mandoli or Rohini prisons when the system logged them at the protest site with timestamps on 24, 25 and 26 July; some had been in custody for years. Delhi Police told the newspaper that further verification of the 2,873 was pending and, in its affidavit, that no action is taken solely on a facial-recognition result and that field verification follows each match. The police disclosed in 2022, in reply to a Right to Information request, that it treats a match with an 80 per cent similarity score as positive. Whether any of the 25 has since been named in the fresh FIR or visited for verification is not reported.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 24/09/2026
19 Jun 2026 to 13 Aug 2026BrazilChatGPT
A man in Brazil was held in pre-trial detention for 54 days in 2026 after OpenAI’s safety systems flagged his ChatGPT conversations and the company reported them to the FBI, which alerted Brazilian police. Police say the messages described a threat to a family member; he denies that intent and his lawyer says he only talked nonsense to the chatbot. A court released him on 13 August under precautionary measures; no charges had been filed as of mid-September. OpenAI did not give police ChatGPT’s replies.
Core + contextual relations High reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/09/2026
14 Jul 2025 to 24 Dec 2025United StatesClearview AI facial recognition (reported)
On 14 July 2025, U.S. Marshals arrested Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old Tennessee grandmother, at gunpoint at her home while she was babysitting four children, on a nationwide-extradition North Dakota warrant: West Fargo police's AI facial-recognition technology had tied her to bank-fraud surveillance of a woman using a fake U.S. Army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars. She fought extradition for about three months in a Tennessee jail, was booked into Cass County, North Dakota on 30 October 2025 on four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft, and was released on 24 December after her bank records showed her more than 1,200 miles away in Tennessee; charges were dismissed without prejudice. Fargo's police chief acknowledged 'incorrect assumptions' linked to the AI identification; an email obtained by KVLY shows six Fargo detectives were notified of her arrest in July, nearly five months before the department says it knew she was in custody. She lost her home, her car and her dog; her attorneys are pursuing potential civil-rights claims, with no lawsuit filed as of 31 March 2026. On 15 September 2026 she filed a $10 million federal civil-rights suit in the District of North Dakota against the City of Fargo and the detective, alleging he relied on a flawed facial-recognition match and ignored exculpatory evidence.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 15/09/2026
1 Aug 2024 to 1 Oct 2024United StatesFACES facial recognition
In August 2024, Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old self-employed commercial crabber from the Fort Myers area, was arrested at his San Carlos Park home on a third-degree felony warrant for the attempted luring of a child at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald's in November 2023 — a crime he had no part in. The warrant rested on a 93%-confidence result from FACES, the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System maintained by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, run against low-resolution cell-phone photos of a surveillance screen, plus a restaurant employee's photo-lineup identification. Dillon spent a night in jail and bonded out against his truck's title; prosecutors dropped the charges in October 2024 after work-alibi evidence, but it took about a year to expunge the arrest and remove his mugshot. In June 2026 the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit (M.D. Fla.) against Jacksonville Beach, the Jacksonville sheriff and the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, calling Dillon one of at least 14 known wrongful arrests from police reliance on facial recognition since 2019.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 15/09/2026
1 Oct 2024 to 1 Aug 2025United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system
Javier Lorenzano Nunez was arrested in October 2024 for the 1998 murder of Sarah Carr after investigators ran the old suspect's MVD photo through facial recognition databases, got 250 possible matches and zeroed in on him — with Phoenix police publicizing the arrest in a press release and a special video. Charges were dismissed without prejudice in August 2025 after forensic evidence, including DNA and fingerprints, excluded him. His lawsuit alleges Phoenix police knew from a 2017 fingerprint analysis that his prints did not match, and ignored a 2007 Puerto Rico lead on the original suspect with the same name, date of birth and social security number. He spent nearly a year in jail. The federal suit against the Phoenix Police Department and the Maricopa County Attorney's Office alleges gross negligence, false arrest, false imprisonment and defamation.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 15/09/2026
2 Jun 2026 to 4 Jun 2026United KingdomGrok
In early June 2026, social media posts and the AI chatbot Grok falsely identified former Hampshire police constable Christi Hill as one of the 'primary officers shown' in bodycam footage of the December 2025 arrest of Henry Nowak, who died after being stabbed. Hill had left the force in April 2024 — more than a year before the murder — and says the misidentification stems from a national police bravery award photo being misattributed. After 'endless threats' and 'threats of violence' she is hiding in a safe house. BBC Verify separately obtained evidence that serving officer Tristan Parsons, also wrongly accused online, was not in the country at the time; the Home Secretary said a misidentified male officer had to move out of his home. Hampshire Constabulary confirmed an unrelated officer was misidentified and received death threats.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 15/09/2026
Mar 2017IrelandSimSimi
In late March 2017 the SimSimi chatbot app, which answers typed text with replies other users have taught it, topped Irish download charts while schools in the Republic of Ireland sent letters and text messages warning parents that pupils' names were being linked to insulting replies (The Irish Times, 26 March 2017). A parent told TheJournal.ie that she and other parents had searched their children's names and found vile comments on each, and that the company said her request would take 15 days to handle. A Dublin secondary teacher told the BBC that primary pupils who typed in their names received personal insults, and that a friend of her 15-year-old son found something mean every time he looked up his name, which hurt him a lot and left him very down. Police in County Down posted a warning on Facebook. From 29 March 2017 the app answered users in Ireland with "I do not talk in Ireland for a while", while remaining available in Northern Ireland. The South Korean developer did not respond to the outlets' requests for comment, and no inspected source says whether access was later restored.
Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Involving minors Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 7 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 12/01/2026