School security AI flagged clarinet as a gun. Exec says it wasn’t an error.

Monitoring these systems continually, humans review AI flags, then text any concerning images detected to school superintendents. Police are alerted when human review determines images may constitute actual threats. ZeroEyes’ spokesperson told Ars that “it has detected more than 1,000 weapons in the last three years.” Perhaps most notably, ZeroEyes “detected a minor armed with an AK-47 rifle on an elementary school campus in Texas,” where no shots were fired, StateScoop reported last year.

Schools invest tens or, as the SCPS case shows, even hundreds of thousands annually, the exact amount depending on the number of cameras they want to employ and other variables impacting pricing. ZeroEyes estimates that most schools pay $60 per camera monthly. Bigger contracts can discount costs. In Kansas, a statewide initiative equipping 25 cameras at 1,300 schools with ZeroEyes was reportedly estimated to cost $8.5 million annually. Doubling the number of cameras didn’t provide much savings, though, with ZeroEyes looking to charge $15.2 million annually to expand coverage.

To critics, it appears that ZeroEyes is attempting to corner the market on AI school security, standing to profit off schools’ fears of shootings, while showing little proof of the true value of its systems. Last year, ZeroEyes reported its revenue grew 300 percent year over year from 2023 to 2024, after assisting in “more than ten arrests through its thousands of detections, verifications, and notifications to end users and law enforcement.”

Curt Lavarello, the executive director of the School Safety Advocacy Council, told the ABC News affiliate that “all of this technology is very, very expensive,” considering that “a lot of products … may not necessarily do what they’re being sold to do.”

Another problem, according to experts who have responded to some of the country’s deadliest school shootings, is that while ZeroEyes’ human reviewers can alert police in “seconds,” police response can often take “several minutes.” That delay could diminish ZeroEyes’ impact, one expert suggested, noting that at an Oregon school he responded to, there was a shooter who “shot 25 people in 60 seconds,” StateScoop reported.