An American middle school was thrust into a disruptive lockdown after its artificial intelligence-powered security system made a startling error, mistaking a musical instrument for a firearm.
The Incident That Shut Down a School
The event unfolded at Lawton Chiles Middle School in Oviedo, Florida. On December 18, 2025, an AI surveillance system operated by the security firm ZeroEyes scanned live footage and flagged a potential weapon. The alert was passed to police, prompting an immediate response.
Officers swarmed the campus and initiated a full lockdown while they conducted a search. The situation was resolved when they located the source of the alarm: a student participating in a dress-up day, wearing a military costume and holding his clarinet. The AI had incorrectly identified the instrument as a rifle.
Company and School Response
ZeroEyes, the company behind the surveillance technology, stated that the system is designed to scan school camera feeds continuously, using AI to spot potential weapons. In a comment to The Washington Post, ZeroEyes co-founder Sam Alaimo defended the response. "We don't think we made an error, nor does the school," Alaimo said. "That was better to dispatch [police] than not dispatch."
The company noted that while staff are trained to review AI alerts before contacting authorities, the clarinet's shape was deemed a close enough match to a rifle to warrant the emergency action.
A Pattern of Problems and a National Crisis
This is not an isolated case of AI security systems generating false alarms. In a separate incident, a student was reportedly handcuffed after a similar system identified a bag of crisps as a gun. These errors occur against a grim backdrop of persistent gun violence in US educational institutions.
The topic of school safety is intensely charged, with hundreds of students having been killed in classroom shootings over decades. The issue was tragically underscored just days before the Florida incident, when two students at Brown University were shot and killed by a gunman who entered a classroom during an exam review. That suspect remains at large.
The national trauma was echoed by Zoe Weissman, a sophomore who survived the 2018 Parkland High School shooting in Florida. Reacting to the Brown University attack, she told CNN, "I'm just angry that there are kids like me in this country who have had to go through this not once, but twice."
As more schools consider adopting advanced surveillance like the ZeroEyes system, the Oviedo incident raises critical questions about the balance between proactive threat detection and the disruption and anxiety caused by false alarms.
