ZeroEyes AI Surveillance System Reportedly Flagged Clarinet as Gun, Triggering School Lockdown in Florida

December 9, 2025

An incident at a Florida middle school highlights the potential risks of unregulated AI deployment, as an AI-powered ZeroEyes surveillance system reportedly flagged a student's clarinet as a firearm, leading to a school lockdown and police response. Despite no threat being found, the incident disrupted classes and subjected students and staff to lockdown conditions and police intervention. This underscores the importance of responsible AI governance in preventing such incidents and ensuring safe and secure learning environments for all. For those interested in shaping trustworthy AI practices and promoting harm prevention, join us at HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) to help establish guardrails for AI.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.692, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.658, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.653, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: seminole-county-public-schools, lawton-chiles-middle-school
Alleged developer: zeroeyes
Alleged harmed parties: lawton-chiles-middle-school-students, lawton-chiles-middle-school-staff

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1312

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.