HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Walmart's AI Voice System Allegedly Collected Illinois Callers' Biometric Voiceprints Without Consent

December 1, 2025

A proposed class action alleges that Walmart's AI voice system captured biometric voiceprints from Illinois residents who called local stores without first obtaining meaningful consent or explaining how the biometric data would be retained and deleted. Plaintiff Amber Smith said the system captured her voiceprint during two calls in December 2025 and one in July 2026.

This incident raises concerns about responsible AI governance, including harm prevention and guardrails for AI development. As such, it is closely related to HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Trusted AI Model only), which focuses on ensuring the safe and secure use of AI technology.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
walmart
Alleged developer
biometric-identity-verification-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
walmart-customers, privacy, general-public-of-illinois, general-public, biometric-data-subjects, amber-smith

AI governance case studies

For forensic AI governance failure analysis (TAIMScore™ case studies), browse Human Signal’s Failure Files™.

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1622

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.