AI incident ·
Remotely Operated Taser-Armed Drones Proposed by Taser Manufacturer as Defense for School Shootings in the US
In brief
An AI system built by Axon Enterprise and deployed by None allegedly harmed Schools, Educational Communities and 1 other.
- Risk domain
- Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 1 report
What happened
Axon Enterprise considered development of remotely operated drones capable of tasering at a target a short distance away as a defense mechanism for mass shootings, despite its internal AI ethics board’s previous objection and condemnation as dangerous and fantastical.
Laws that address this harm
Policy angle: Classified under Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms (Governance failure) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.
- Colorado AI Act
- Framework Convention on AI (CETS 225)
- India DPDP Act
- Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025)
- Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (1)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- None
- Alleged developer
- Axon Enterprise
- Alleged harmed party
- Schools, Educational Communities, Students
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms
- Risk subdomain
- 6.5 Governance failure
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Pre-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 6.5.
- Liability issues in case of accidents
"Despite the promise of streamlined travel, AI also brings concerns about who is liable in case of accidents and which ethical principles autonomous transportation agents should follow when making decisions with a potent...
- Mobility
"Despite the promise of streamlined travel, AI also brings concerns about who is liable in case of accidents and which ethical principles autonomous transportation agents should follow when making decisions with a potent...
- Faster scientific progress makes it harder for governance to keep pace with development
"Exacerbating these problems is that faster scientific progress would make it even harder for governance to keep pace with the deployment of new technologies. When these technologies are especially powerful or dangerous,...
- Type 1: Diffusion of responsibility
Societal-scale harm can arise from AI built by a diffuse collection of creators, where no one is uniquely accountable for the technology's creation or use, as in a classic "tragedy of the commons".
- Products Liability Law
"Like manufactured items like soda bottles, mechanized lawnmowers, pharmaceuticals, or cosmetic products, generative AI models can be viewed like a new form of digital products developed by tech companies and deployed wi...
- Difficult to develop metrics for evaluating benefits or harms caused by AI assistants
"Another difficulty facing AI assistant systems is that it is challenging to develop metrics for evaluating particular aspects of benefits or harms caused by the assistant – especially in a sufficiently expansive sense,...
- Institutional responsibilities
"Efforts to deploy advanced assistant technology in society, in a way that is broadly beneficial, can be viewed as a wicked problem (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Wicked problems are defined by the property that they do not...
- General Evaluations (Limited coverage of capabilities evaluations)
"GPAI model developers might run capabilities evaluations to determine whether it has dangerous or dual-use capabilities, and then decide whether it is safe to deploy. Such capabilities evaluations can fail to demonstrat...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- Nippon Life Alleged ChatGPT Practiced Law Without a License in Illinois Disability Case
- OpenAI Allegedly Did Not Alert RCMP After ChatGPT Flagged Violent Chats Before British Columbia School Shooting
Other incidents involving None
Source record: incident #252 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report