2025United StatesGoogle AI Overviews (reported)
In August 2025 Stefanina's, a family-owned pizzeria in Wentzville, Missouri, posted on Facebook asking customers not to use Google AI to find its specials. The restaurant said Google AI was telling people about specials that do not exist, that this was causing angry customers to yell at its employees, and that it would not honour the Google AI specials. Staff told KMOV and FOX 2 that the AI Overview at the top of Google Search had shown deals such as a large pizza for the price of a small one and a second pizza for $4. A manager described a customer who came in asking for a special the manager had never heard of, found in the AI-generated first search response, and said customers kept asking why the specials were not honoured. Google did not respond to either station. The account comes from the restaurant; no AI Overview text or customer account was published.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 16/10/2026
17 Jul 2026United StatesUnidentified voice-cloning tool
The Boone County Sheriff's Office in Missouri said that on Friday 17 July 2026 a resident received a call whose caller ID showed their daughter's number. A voice that sounded like the daughter said she had been kidnapped at gunpoint, and another voice then demanded ransom. The office said it later determined that the voice was AI-generated, without saying how. Deputies found the daughter safe in Jefferson City and unaware of the call. The office called it the first AI voice-impersonation call it had encountered. No suspect had been identified by 19 July, and no source reports whether any money was paid.
Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/10/2026
Event date unknownUnited StatesTimpani
Nurses at HCA Healthcare, the largest US hospital chain, told WIRED, in an article published on 2 October 2026, that Timpani, an AI scheduling tool HCA co-developed with Palantir and has rolled out at about 130 of its 190 locations, assigns shifts that ignore their requests. A Florida critical care nurse said that over four months the tool gave her different shifts for more than half of the 50 she requested, often back-to-back days that left her mentally drained. A Missouri nurse said essentially every nurse at their facility had been assigned to work on a requested day off, and that they delayed a long-planned doctor's appointment for a chronic condition after struggling to trade such a day. HCA says nursing leaders, not Timpani, make final scheduling decisions and that the tool schedules nurses on about 1 percent of requested days off.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 13/10/2026
Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool
A Missouri man is charged with sexual exploitation of a minor and possession of child sexual abuse material after a cybertip from a company operating a generative AI chatbot. According to the police probable cause statement as reported by a local newspaper, he told officers he uploaded photographs of children to an AI generator to undress them. He pleaded not guilty; the tool and the number of children are not reported.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 30/09/2026
7 Jan 2026 to 9 Jan 2026United StatesGrok
After a federal immigration agent killed a woman in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026, X users circulated AI-generated images that purported to show the masked agent's face. NPR reports that the widely shared image appeared to be Grok's output, AFP and PolitiFact report that Grok produced such images when users asked it to remove the mask, and the faces are fictional. Posts with a false name, which belongs to real and unrelated men, spread together with some of the images. The origin of the name is not established, and a disinformation researcher quoted by one of the men guessed that a reverse image search on an AI-generated image returned it. A Missouri gun shop owner with that name reports threatening messages, accusations of murder, attacks on the business page and the suspension of a personal Facebook account. The publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, who has the same name, reports hundreds and then thousands of posts naming the publisher as the agent, including calls for vigilante justice, and the newspaper issued a statement calling it a coordinated disinformation campaign. AFP reports that xAI answered its inquiry with an automated reply. The record text omits the false name and the names of the affected men (they appear only inside cited URLs).
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources · Added 30/09/2026
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
5 Apr 2025United StatesGemini
A man in the United States went missing in rural Missouri on 5 April 2025, and his wife has told Rolling Stone (October 2025) and the Washingtonian (January 2026) that intensive use of Google’s Gemini chatbot preceded it. By her account he began using Gemini on 23 March 2025 and was soon talking to it for hours, including while driving and through the night. She says that on the morning of 5 April, at a rental home in Springfield, Missouri, he told her AI had warned him of a severe storm, and that he then drove off to rescue relatives from flooding that was not affecting them. Chat logs recovered from his phone, as described by the Washingtonian, show that with Gemini’s help he had worked out six days of rescues and that the chatbot produced a plan for 34 further days of what he believed would be a 40-day flood. Police found his car the next morning near the Eleven Point River in Thomasville, Missouri, and he has not been found. His wife believes he would not have gone missing without the chatbot. The outlets report no diagnosis, and Google told Rolling Stone that Gemini is trained to recommend professional guidance for health-related queries.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 25/08/2026