Florida woman used Claude as a diary, then Anthropic reported an entry to police

What just happened? Another incident has taken place that illustrates the need to be careful what you tell AI. A Florida woman is facing felony charges after she used Claude as a diary and allegedly wrote that she planned to “shoot up” the Sheriff’s office. After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.

According to the arrest report, Carli Michelle Heller, of Bonita Springs, Florida, wrote on September 26 that she would attack the Sheriff’s office. She later said that she uses Anthropic’s chatbot like a “diary.”

Claude’s safety systems flagged the entry and it was escalated to a human reviewer. After deciding it was a credible threat, the reviewer reported it to law enforcement.

The company says it may share user information in limited emergencies if it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury.

Deputies identified Heller and visited her home. She was detained without incident before an LCSO intelligence detective took over the investigation.

Heller faces a charge of making a written threat of violence under Florida law. Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism. The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.

Anthropic isn’t going to be taking any chances when it comes to anything it deems a potential threat. Last month, it was reported that OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by British Columbia over claims that the company could have prevented a mass shooting in the Canadian province.

The shooter, eighteen-year-old former pupil Jesse Van ⁠Rootselaar, had previously been flagged by OpenAI’s safety team for her conversations about gun violence, but OpenAI never alerted police because the conversations did not meet the threshold for legal referral.

In June, Florida also sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging that ChatGPT had contributed to real-world harms, including the 2025 Florida State University shooting.

The latest incident is another reminder to think before you enter something into a chatbot that could get you into trouble. It’s certainly not a private diary whose contents are for your eyes only.

Reports last month revealed that human contractors reviewing Microsoft Copilot’s image editor can see users’ prompts, uploaded photos and AI-generated edits. Documents show that some of those assignments contain sexual, disturbing or potentially illegal material, though the reviewers are not there to flag the content – only to assess whether the output is accurate.

www.techspot.com/news/114091-florida-woman-used-claude-diary-anthropic-reported-shoot.html

Stupid, stupid, stupid human. Well, those are the consequences of what she chose to do. Which is write a threat. Threats are not protected speech, or so the courts have decided. We created these circumstances, so we can either navigate them with care or run afoul and be chewed up and shat out by the institutional systems we ourselves built.

sigh.

it’s exhausting, really.

Writing a threat is not illegal. Hell people vent all the time, threatening to do things they know damn well they never will. The law says transmitting a threat to another person is illegal because it can be used as intimidation or conspiracy. I think there’s a damn good argument that she didn’t knowingly transmit it to anyone. She thought she was writing in confidence to a non-person. And if it’s not her first time expressing outrage to AI, she would know it would only try to deescalate her.

Who knows how the case will go. I can see it going either way — probably depending on how much money she has. Laws are going to have to catch up to technology in this case, and it’s going to be bumpy. I definitely agree with erring on the side of caution. Private, local AI is far safer, but of course it’s less capable for now.

The article very much states that it is in fact illegal to write down a threat under Florida law.

I think this is a combination of the law being poorly written and the woman in question making a significantly questionable decision. Her actions have consequences (even if I think that law is problematic at best). There’s no reason for her to have had an expectation that Claude chats would be private (we’ve had repeated news reports that prove otherwise).