Anthropic reports Florida woman’s Claude ‘diary’ threat to shoot up sheriff’s office, felony charge follows
Anthropic reviewers reported a Florida woman’s Claude threat against the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, leading to a felony charge.
A woman in Florida was arrested for a felony charge after allegedly threatening to shoot up the Lee County Sheriff's Office based on a conversation with an Anthropic Claude AI chatbot. The arrest report reveals that the woman, identified as "Carli," made a threat on September 26 and mentioned a new gun the following day. This was not the first incident of its kind; there have been at least three similar cases reported to police since August.
Anthropic's human review team monitors chats for potentially threatening content and elevates them to human review when necessary. In this case, the team decided to report the findings to law enforcement. The woman was detained without incident, and an LCSO intelligence detective took over the case. The arrest report lists a felony charge under Florida Statute 836.10 for written or electronic threats of mass shootings or acts of terrorism.
Anthropic's privacy policy allows for disclosure to law enforcement if it has a good-faith belief that it is necessary to prevent serious harm. The incident comes amid a series of recent cases involving chatbots from Anthropic and OpenAI, raising concerns about privacy and security. OpenAI faced similar issues in Florida, with a man pleading guilty to writing threatening messages to the company's AI chatbot and facing eight years' probation.
Experts and legal professionals are calling for stricter guidelines and independent oversight to address these challenges.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
