1 May 2021BrazilUnidentified death-record matching system
A Brazilian federal judge in the 4th federal region ordered the social security institute (INSS) to pay a retiree R$3,917.67 in moral damages after finding that his pension had been stopped by a failure of the institute's artificial intelligence system, according to a Federal Regional Court of the 4th Region (TRF4) news item relayed by the Brazilian Institute of Social Security Law on 30 September 2022. The judge explained that the benefit was suspended automatically on 1 May 2021 by an artificial intelligence command that captured data from the death-records system (Sisobi), and that the data used, the person's name and mother's name, were not enough to prevent the wrongful cessation. The retiree said the pension was his only source of income; he asked for reactivation and sent a handwritten declaration, and although he showed in person that he was alive, the benefit was restored only in January 2022. The judge wrote that the AI 'proved inefficient or unintelligent' in this case and that the INSS made him wait 226 days. Arrears were also ordered paid. Whether the INSS appealed is not reported.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 02/11/2026
Jan 2021United StatesHireVue (reported)
A man who applied for a supply chain job with CVS in Massachusetts around January 2021 says CVS put him through a HireVue video interview with questions about integrity, and alleges that HireVue sent the recording to a platform called Affectiva, which analysed his facial expressions, eye contact, voice intonation and inflection with artificial intelligence and fed a score to CVS. He sued CVS in a proposed class action under the Massachusetts Lie Detector Statute, alleging the interview was a lie detector test and that the online application lacked the notice of rights the law requires. He says he did not know the interview was a lie detector test and would not have taken part had he known. In February 2024 a federal judge in Massachusetts denied CVS's motion to dismiss the notice claim, finding a concrete informational injury; CVS had not challenged the other claims at that stage. A law firm commentary says he was not hired. In July 2024 he reached an individual settlement with CVS, whose terms were not reported. The allegations about the AI analysis were not tested in court.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 02/11/2026
16 Apr 2021United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers (reported)
At about 5:30 a.m. on 16 April 2021, according to a lawsuit reported by The Almanac, an automated license-plate reader in Atherton, California, misread the dirt-obscured plate of a driver's car, reading its letter H as M, and matched it to a reported stolen vehicle. Atherton police followed the car for several minutes without visually verifying the plate, then made a high-risk felony stop, ordering him at gunpoint to throw his keys out of the window, get out and lie on his stomach to be handcuffed. He sued three officers in 2022 for unreasonable seizure and excessive force; the officers denied the allegations and the injuries he claimed, and the case was settled on 16 March 2023 for $45,000. Business Insider, citing police records, reported in March 2026 that the misread came from a Flock camera and that officers noted the Flock cameras had misread the plate; an Atherton police commander said the plate was obstructed by dirt and that the town denies wrongdoing.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 04/10/2026
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