AI Sent an Innocent Grandma to Jail for 5 Months

On July 14, 2025, United States Marshalls entered the home of 49-year-old Tennessee woman Angela Lipps and arrested her in front of four young children that she was babysitting. Authorities believed that Lipps had defrauded a series of North Dakota banks. That’s because the West Fargo Police Department had fed a photo ID used by the suspect into Clearview AI—a database with billions of pictures, many scraped from the internet, intended to aid law enforcement investigation. Lipps had been flagged as a match. But the Tennessee grandmother had never even been to North Dakota. And so for five months, she...