A school survivor is suing an AI gun detection company after the machine failed to detect weapons

A teenage survivor injured in the January 2025 shooting at a high school in Nashville, Tennessee recently sued the developer of an “AI gun detection system” that failed to detect the gun that left two dead, including the shooter.

According to the casefiled in Davidson County court last month, the security company Omnilert either knew or should have known that there were “significant restrictions on the use of its firearms detection equipment that could lead to failure to detect during an emergency, including limitations based on camera placement, proximity of the weapon to camera sensors, camera angle, lighting, and weapon orientation.”

Omnilert co-founder Ara Bagdasarian declined Ars’ invitation to respond to questions about the lawsuit. System Integrations, another defendant in the lawsuit, which also sold the Omnilert system, also did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.

In 2023, the Board of Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS). to be approved a $1 million contract to install an AI-based detection system on top of its state-of-the-art cameras and security-related equipment.

MNPS spokesman Sean Braisted he said at a press conference following the January 2025 recording that due to where the shooter was in relation to the cameras, the image “wasn’t close enough for us to accurately read and activate the alarm.”

This case is often based on advertising copy on the Omnilert website (eg archived on the Internet Archive just days before the shooting), stating that the company oversold its power:

Omnilert also showed that AI-powered gun detection “could have reduced or prevented the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting” by identifying threats in the past – prompting one of the country’s worst-hit schools to explain that its design could have prevented similar incidents…

Omnilert did not mention false alarms, false claims, or restrictions of any kind on its commercial website prior to the shooting.

Using the exact conditions under which the detection method works is questionable, Chris Smith, one of the attorneys, told Ars.