Hmm, based on the pictures in the article this thing is basically a camera in a shiny ball about 1ft in diameter (it appears to be about the width of 3 bricks laid side by side). It’s not like a Cloud Gate-sized object. To get a scan of your irises you would have to be pretty close to it for at least a few seconds - it’s not like it could get a scan if you’re just walking by a few feet away. You’d have to walk up and point your face at it on purpose. The camera in it also looks fixed - I doubt it can rotate to follow you, that would be mechanically complex, expensive and prone to failure.
Based on the description, their software takes an image of your irises and reduces it to a hash value. The original image is deleted (they claim) and the hash value is stored as an ID code. It seems likely that the hash value will be unique to their software - e.g. if you wrote your own code to produce hash values from images, you would get a different number even if you had the same picture of the same eyes. So the hash value doesn’t necessarily represent anything about your eyes that would be much of a privacy invasion… It’s just a mathematically derived number string which is unique to their software.
It’s not clear what part of this system is “AI”, though my guess would be it has something to do with re-identifying your eyes next time you want to access whatever is secured with your hash code. It’s really not clear how that would work… a new image of your eyes collected a year later under different lighting conditions would probably produce a different hash value, so how does this system match them, if it only records the hashes?
FWIW, I think smashing or spray painting these things, while fun ideas in the rebellious teenager sense, is probably overkill and likely to get you more attention from law enforcement than you want. But, you could probably just walk up behind it and slap a sticker or tape over the camera… they’d still have to pay someone to go out and peel it off.