Apr 2019United KingdomHM Passport Office photo checker
The UK government's online passport application uses an automated face-detection check that tells applicants when it thinks an uploaded photo breaks the rules, which include a neutral expression and a closed mouth. In September 2019 PA reported that a young Black man renewing his passport online said the checker mistook his lips for an open mouth, and that to submit the photo anyway he had to write in a comment box that his mouth was closed and he just had big lips. PA also reported that a Black educational technologist said the system told her that her eyes looked closed and that it could not find the outline of her head; she told the BBC she uploaded 10 photographs over a week and each was rated poor, and PA reported that the Passport Office tweeted that it was sorry the service had not worked as it should. In October 2020 a BBC investigation reported that a Black student said she was wrongly told her mouth looked open on each of five photos and got one accepted only by writing a note challenging the verdict. The BBC fed 1,130 passport-style photos of politicians into the checker and found that photos of dark-skinned women were graded poor quality 22% of the time against 14% for light-skinned women; it reported that documents released under a 2019 freedom of information request showed the Home Office knew of the problem but judged overall performance good enough to launch. The Home Office said applicants can override the check, that the checker is a customer aid, and that its systems are improving.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 29/10/2026
2020NetherlandsProctorio
During the 2020/21 academic year, when exams at VU Amsterdam were held online because of the pandemic, some exams required students to run Proctorio proctoring software, which according to the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights used face-detection algorithms during a pre-exam webcam check to judge whether the student was in view. A master's student says the software had trouble recognising her, that she regularly received 'face not found' or 'room too dark' messages, lost time, shone a bright lamp into her face while taking exams, and experienced stress and a feeling of insecurity; she suspected the failures were linked to her dark skin and complained to the Institute in July 2022. In an interim ruling of 7 December 2022 the Institute found sufficient indications for a presumption of discrimination. In its final ruling of 17 October 2023 it found that the university had proved it had not discriminated against her by using Proctorio: on the exam where her setup took longer than average (31 March 2021), the webcam check failed three times and she passed within eight seconds after the helpdesk advised her to remove her glasses, a known Proctorio problem the Institute treated as unrelated to skin colour; a restart during that exam was very likely caused by an unstable internet connection; and it considered it plausible that she had no need to keep a lamp shining in her face for long periods. It found that the university had discriminated in handling her complaint, which took from 1 October 2021 to 11 May 2022 to be taken up. The university apologised that she had not felt heard.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 4 sources · Added 28/10/2026
25 May 2025IsraelUnidentified AI tool
In May 2025 the Ramat Gan municipality in Israel refused a request that a special-education pupil be given school transport from his father's home, citing an Education Ministry director-general circular and quotations from recent rulings. The father's lawyer could not find the circular, and the Education Ministry said it did not know it. After the father petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court, the municipality agreed in July 2025 to restore the transport but again filed invented quotations, and the district court refused costs. On appeal, the Supreme Court (Deputy President Noam Sohlberg, ruling published 22 March 2026) held that the documents left no doubt that the municipality had used artificial intelligence and that its decision, at least as presented to the pupil, clearly rested on uncontrolled AI use. It ordered the municipality to pay 30,000 shekels in costs.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources · Added 27/10/2026
2024United StatesGaggle
The Lawrence, Kansas, school district began using Gaggle, a student-monitoring service, on school accounts in November 2023. A federal lawsuit filed on 1 August 2025 by current and former students alleges that Gaggle, which the complaint says operates through artificial intelligence that flags items for review by Gaggle moderators, flagged original photography assignments uploaded by art and photography students. According to the complaint, in early 2024 security officers took students out of class to the front office of a Lawrence high school, where administrators told them their images had been flagged by Gaggle for indecent exposure and child pornography; an assistant principal accused a photography student of having such material, refused to let her view the images, and questioned her about them from memory, and administrators admitted they had not seen the flagged content. The student told them she had uploaded that day a photography assignment showing a fully clothed friend; the complaint says the flagged content consisted of original photographs taken for class assignments, that students found their photographs removed from their school accounts only by comparing them with personal backups, that one student had to explain each image in her portfolio to district staff and became concerned that future assignments would bring more scrutiny, and that the district restored the images only after months of advocacy. The Associated Press, in reporting that included an analysis of the district's Gaggle alert records, said the photos had been automatically deleted and that students with backups showed it was a false alarm, and that district officials said they later adjusted the software's settings to reduce false alerts. On 8 April 2026 the federal court dismissed, on qualified immunity, the claims against the assistant principal and another official, saying it had found no law establishing that a school official cannot rely on an AI surveillance flag to call in a student for questioning; other claims against the district continue, and the docket shows depositions noticed in October 2026.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 27/10/2026
2025RussiaAntiplagiat AI-text detector
RAPSI and BIZNES Online reported on 8 and 10 June 2026 that the Supreme Court of Tatarstan upheld a ruling that a private Moscow university unlawfully expelled a distance-learning student in 2025 over suspected use of AI in her graduation thesis. According to the university's representatives in court as reported, the Antiplagiat.Vuz system first showed about 41% (41.91%) AI-generated text, her supervisor then said the word order had been deliberately disturbed in more than 70% of the text, and a third check showed 11.92%. BIZNES Online also reports, from the court documents, that a university representative told the court the supervisor does not operate the checking system and had not in fact analysed the text for neural-network generation, and could not explain how the system distinguishes borrowed text from AI generation. The university refused the revised work as late (uploaded on Monday 9 June 2025 against a deadline of 8 June) and expelled her; the department's protocol cited a breach of good-faith work in the Antiplagiat.Vuz system. She denied using AI. In January 2026 the Vakhitovsky District Court of Kazan held the expulsion unlawful, ordered her reinstatement for a check of her thesis and, if it met the originality threshold, admission to the defence, and awarded 40,000 roubles in moral damages and a 20,000-rouble fine. The Supreme Court of Tatarstan dismissed the university's appeal: it held that the probabilistic report had not been checked by a competent expert and could not be the sole proof of bad faith, noted that the same text was classified as AI-generated in one report and not in another, and found no evidence that any flagged fragments resulted from her deliberate acts rather than her sources or an incorrect algorithm. The courts also held the deadline had been miscounted.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/10/2026
Dec 2023 to Mar 2024United StatesGrammarly (reported)
In late 2023 a junior at a public high school in Hingham, Massachusetts, and a classmate submitted a script for an AP U.S. History project that, a federal court later found on a preliminary record, contained text copied from Grammarly, a publicly available AI tool, including citations to nonexistent books, with no acknowledgement of AI use. Turnitin and other AI detection tools had flagged the script, and a school official says the pupil admitted using Grammarly. In December 2023 the school treated it as cheating: the pupil failed two parts of the project, served a Saturday detention and was rejected from the National Honor Society in spring 2024, though he was later admitted. His parents sued, arguing the school had not made its AI rules clear; on 20 November 2024 the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts refused a preliminary injunction to undo the penalties, and in February 2025 the parties dismissed the case with prejudice.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 23/10/2026
9 Oct 2024 to 5 Dec 2024United StatesGaggle (reported)
On 9 October 2024 a Marana Unified School District pupil in Arizona, typing at home on a school Chromebook in front of his mother, wrote a threat-like joke about shooting up the school in a draft email to a teacher and deleted it without sending it, according to his family's federal lawsuit. The family says Gaggle, the AI-based monitoring software the district used, flagged it: the principal received a Gaggle notification with a photograph of the screen and, with the school resource officer, called the mother within the hour. The family says the pupil was suspended for ten days, a long-term suspension hearing imposed 45 days reducible to eleven with counselling, and the superintendent finally affirmed a nine-day suspension in December 2024. In March 2026 the District of Arizona let the family's First Amendment claim proceed and dismissed its procedural due process claims. The district declined to comment to the press.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026
Event date unknownRussiaUnidentified legal research tool
Russia's Court for Intellectual Property Rights fined an individual entrepreneur from Udmurtia 5,000 roubles for contempt of court after finding that part of the 12 references to case law in his cassation appeal, including one said to be a Supreme Court position, pointed to court acts that do not exist or attributed conclusions to them, the court's press service told RIA Novosti on 27 August 2026. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports that the entrepreneur explained he had prepared the appeal with an AI-based service that selected the case law, and that his side argued he had no legal education and could not check the references; the court rejected the argument that the errors were technical. The date of the ruling and the AI service are not reported.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 23/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified AI-text detector
A case summary published in July 2025 by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA), the independent student complaints scheme for England and Wales, describes a student with autism who was accused of including large sections of AI-generated content in an essay. The student denied using AI and submitted planning and notes. A disciplinary panel, which had the provider's AI detection software report and compared the essay with other work by the student, found academic misconduct and gave a mark of zero with any reassessment capped at a pass; the provider rejected the appeal, in which the student said the same software had earlier flagged another of their essays in a case where it had been agreed they had not used AI. The OIA found the complaint Justified: the panel had not properly considered the student's evidence, had not shared some evidence it relied on, and had not given sufficient reasons. It recommended reconsideration and changes to the provider's rules, and the student told the OIA that on reconsideration the provider decided there had been no misconduct. The provider and the software are not named.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 23/10/2026
9 Dec 2025United StatesZeroEyes gun detection
On 9 December 2025 a Seminole County, Florida, middle school went into a Code Red lockdown and police rushed to the campus after the ZeroEyes AI weapons detection system, whose alerts are checked by the company's human analysts before police are notified, flagged a student holding a clarinet as a possible gun. According to a police report reviewed by The Washington Post (as relayed by Ars Technica) and obtained by WKMG News 6, officers expected an armed person in camouflage holding a shouldered rifle; dispatch later told them the suspected rifle was likely a band instrument, and police found the student, who was dressed as a military film character for a themed dress-up day, among panicked students hiding in the band room. Officers questioned him and found no weapon in his backpack or instrument case (Oviedo Community News, February 2026). The student said he was unaware the way he held the clarinet could trigger the alert. ZeroEyes said it had not made an error, while also treating the alert as a true positive only until officers on the ground found no rifle and then classifying it as a false positive; the district said the system worked as intended; the principal asked parents to talk to their children about the dangers of pretending to have a weapon.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 23/10/2026
27 Aug 2026United StatesGPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5 (reported)
A kindergarten teacher at a public elementary school in Concord, Massachusetts, was dismissed in August 2025 after an unsatisfactory evaluation. In arbitration she argued that some of the principal's evaluations may have been produced with AI, relying on GPTZero estimates; the principal denied using AI beyond grammar checks. According to the arbitration decision as reported by The Concord Bridge, the arbitrator stated in an appendix that he used two AI tools, GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5, to research whether GPTZero was reliable, checked some of the sources they supplied, concluded that GPTZero's results deserved no weight, and upheld the dismissal on 27 August 2026. On 28 September 2026 the teacher asked Suffolk Superior Court to vacate the decision, alleging that the AI-assisted research was an improper investigation outside the hearing record that the parties were not told about or allowed to challenge. These are allegations in a complaint; the district declined to comment and no court has ruled.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 14/10/2026
2024AustraliaTurnitin AI-text detector
The ABC reported on 9 October 2025 that Australian Catholic University (ACU) registered nearly 6,000 cases of alleged academic misconduct across its nine campuses in 2024, according to internal documents, and that about 90 per cent of the referrals related to AI use. The ABC reports that the university's case against a final-year paramedic student hinged on a single AI-generated report that, the student said, marked 84 per cent of an essay as AI-written; the student produced dozens of pages of evidence and the ABC describes the student as wrongly accused. Students the ABC spoke to said they were notified at the end of semester, had little time to respond and waited months to be cleared, and the ABC saw emails asking students for handwritten notes and internet search histories. A final-year nursing student was cleared after six months, during which her transcript read 'results withheld'; she believes this cost her a graduate position, and the report does not say what evidence prompted her referral. The ABC says internal documents show ACU knew of problems with the detector for more than a year before abandoning the Turnitin tool in March. ACU's deputy vice-chancellor called the figures substantially overstated, said cases resting solely on Turnitin's AI detection were dismissed immediately, acknowledged investigations were not always timely and said the university regretted the impact on some students.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 06/10/2026
Event date unknownUnited StatesTurnitin AI-text detector (reported)
The University Press, Florida Atlantic University's student newspaper, reported on 29 September 2026 the accounts of two students who say they were penalised over AI-detection flags. A computer science sophomore submitted a paper 'last year' and received a zero after the professor flagged it for AI use after applying it to Turnitin; after the student emailed the professor, the grade was improved. The student says that when they ran the paper through a detector, it said the writing was overly human-sounding. A senior sociology major was accused of using AI on an essay and received a zero with little communication from the professor; after the student emailed to say no AI was used, the professor waived the penalty and gave a 50. The newspaper describes the second student's grade as due to a false AI detection and does not name the tool in that case. No professor's or university account of either case is reported.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026
30 Sept 2026 to 1 Oct 2026Event location unknownTurnitin AI-text detector (reported)
In a public post to r/ApplyingToCollege early on 1 October 2026 (UTC), a student taking the Advanced Placement (AP) Research course writes that their teacher told them that day that their source annotations had been found to be '100% ai' by Turnitin. The student says they did not use AI. They say their document history shows them typing over the course of an hour and that some sentences closely follow notes they wrote for an earlier assignment. They also say they had faced no AI accusation in a research course with the same teacher the year before. By the student's account, the teacher said the matter would be discussed later and that Turnitin's AI checker feedback never ends up being a false accusation. The student says the accusation leaves them upset and unsure how to defend themselves. No grade or disciplinary outcome is reported. The account is uncorroborated, and one commenter doubted it.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 01/10/2026
Mar 2025United StatesJewish Onliner (suspected)
In March 2025 Yale placed a Yale Law School scholar, who was deputy director of a Yale Law School project, on administrative leave and barred the scholar from campus. The New York Times reports the decision came three days after a news site described as powered at least in part by artificial intelligence published a story on the scholar's connections to Samidoun, a group on a US sanctions list. Inside Higher Ed and Middle East Eye identify the site as Jewish Onliner. The scholar's lawyer says Yale's general counsel named the article as the trigger of the investigation. The scholar told the Times of not being a member of any organization that would violate US law, and the lawyer says the scholar is not a member of Samidoun. A Yale Law School representative told The National that placing an employee on temporary administrative leave while a review is conducted is the appropriate process and that the scholar's short-term position was due to expire the following month. The site says humans fact-check and that AI tools play a significant role in its work. The inspected sources do not show that AI produced the article.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
12 Mar 2025 to 3 Apr 2025United StatesChatGPT
In March and early April 2025 (the opinion gives no date for the ChatGPT step), a DOGE staff member working with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) submitted short grant descriptions to ChatGPT with a prompt asking whether each project related at all to DEI, and the answers were combined with NEH staff ratings into lists of grants to terminate. More than 1,400 NEH grants (over $100 million) were terminated in notices sent 1 to 3 April 2025. A federal district court found the mass termination unlawful in May 2026 and described the ChatGPT step in its findings. Seven individual grantees who sued report lost or interrupted funding for their research and writing projects. The opinion does not state whether ChatGPT reviewed those seven grants.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution unclear · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · 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
Aug 2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI-text detector
In an August 2025 first-person post, a student said they discovered a zero for a summer-course discussion assignment after a checker labelled 85% of the text AI-generated. They denied using AI to write it, reported contacting the professor, and described anger and fear of future accusations. Neither the detector output nor the school’s account was available for verification.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 29/09/2026
Nov 2023VietnamUnidentified AI writing tool and Turnitin (reported)
In November 2023 a student at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages and Information Technology (HUFLIT) wrote on the university's anonymous confessions page that a writing-course essay had been returned with 50 percent of the marks deducted because the lecturer found it had been written with AI. The student said the lecturer had warned that AI-written essays would be treated as plagiarism if detected, had not expected detection, and learned from the lecturer that Vietnamese-to-English translation software could also be counted as AI use when checked with specialised plagiarism software; the student did not know whether the course could still be passed. The vice-rector told Tuoi Tre that the lecturer had told students before the assignment not to use AI applications, that the course tests independent writing, that using an AI support tool breached academic-integrity rules, and that the deduction was appropriate, while noting the university had no formal document on sanctions for AI use. A university representative told Thanh Nien and Dan Tri that the university does not ban AI but requires transparency about tools used, uses paid AI-detection services when necessary, and had not received a formal complaint from the student; a later report said the university had bought Turnitin licences for lecturers to check AI use in essays.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 20/09/2026