Anthropic Reports Florida Woman's Claude 'Diary' Threat to Law Enforcement (tomshardware.com)
- Reference: 0186031028
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/10/05/1733245/anthropic-reports-florida-womans-claude-diary-threat-to-law-enforcement
- Source link: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-reports-florida-womans-claude-diary-threat-to-shoot-up-sheriffs-office-felony-charge-follows-its-at-least-the-third-such-conversation-to-reach-police-since-august
> Anthropic monitors chats for key phrases and content that could be deemed threatening, the arrest report says, and depending on severity, they can be elevated for human review. In this case, the team decided to report its findings to law enforcement. The Bonita Springs woman was detained at home without incident, and an LCSO intelligence detective took over the case from there. The arrest report is not yet in the court file, but our own check shows court records listing the Sept. 30 felony charge under Florida Statute 836.10: written or electronic threat of a mass shooting or act of terrorism.
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> No comment from Anthropic on the case is currently on record. Anthropic's public privacy policy, effective Sept. 10, says that disclosure to law enforcement may occur where it has a good-faith belief "that disclosure is reasonably necessary to ... prevent serious harm to any person or to property." Its government requests report for the latter half of 2025 uses a narrower standard for emergency disclosures, the "danger of death or serious physical injury to a person," and lists zero emergency requests from law enforcement in that period, though it doesn't count referrals Anthropic makes on its own.
[1] https://www.winknews.com/news/woman-arrested-after-ai-threat-against-lee-county-sheriffs-office-investigators/article_3d4c5915-7015-43c0-b86a-d7fa5eadf958.html
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-reports-florida-womans-claude-diary-threat-to-shoot-up-sheriffs-office-felony-charge-follows-its-at-least-the-third-such-conversation-to-reach-police-since-august
Re: (Score:2)
Dude, in what other (non-AI situation) would you encourage a company to not report a future mass-shooting?
Threating to "shoot up" a police station (Score:3)
Of course you should be arrested, AI or not.
Re: (Score:2)
Where do we draw the line between "crazy lady yells at cloud to vent" and "crazy lady with actual gun has actual plans"?
What actually happened here?
Re: (Score:3)
> Where do we draw the line between "crazy lady yells at cloud to vent" and "crazy lady with actual gun has actual plans"?
> What actually happened here?
No where, we go, assume a threat is real, investigate and let the legal system deal with the results. People seem to think that police work extends to just acting on a phone call and calling it a day, it doesn't. Arresting some people for something which turned out to be false isn't that much of an issue, unless the arrest itself is actually violent (e.g. SWATting)
In most countries in the world people are pre-emptively detained if there's an uncertain and unclear risk. They are then investigated and usually
Re: (Score:3)
Building your resume to go work at the thought crimes division, huh?
Re: (Score:2)
No! Nothing happened here. This person wrote something in a place they thought was private. Someone spied on them an ratted them out, but nothing actually happened and no one should be under arrest. No was was harmed, no one was threatened, nothing happened.
This is some crazy big brother shit that should not happen.
Re: (Score:2)
Who did she threaten? Calling up a police station and saying you're going to shoot it up is a threat. Discussing it with a chatbot, well, that's ambiguous and it's hard to see how that would be a threat.
Re: (Score:2)
Rather than a threat I'd say it moreso would fall under "conspiracy to commit murder".
Discussing plans to commit a crime is a crime (eg, conspiracy).
Now, I'd wager she didn't really intend to go through with this, and in the end there's a good chance the charges get dropped, but seriously - don't be talking about shit like that. I can't even see where someone would joke, vent, or otherwise say - even in private - that they plan on committing a mass murder.
"That police department is a bunch of assholes!" -
Re: (Score:1)
> Rather than a threat I'd say it moreso would fall under "conspiracy to commit murder". Discussing plans to commit a crime is a crime (eg, conspiracy).
Conspiracy requires two or more people to be planning to commit a crime. Is AI a person?
Re: (Score:2)
Clearly, the one thing that an AI chatbot cannot hallucinate about is whether someone made a threat when no one else was present.
Always assume that... (Score:3)
...every interaction with a cloud based AI is being monitored.
The only way to be safe is with a local model that does not have internet access.
Yeah, ok? (Score:3)
That's exactly what should happen.
For once this is a happy story about AI which occurred through the user's ignorance. They were stupid enough to think they wouldn't get reported because they were talking to an automated system.
In a first world country this either would be a story about a woman being reported to the police for a threat by their therapist, or it wouldn't have happened in the first place, because she would have access to mental health care instead of trivial access to firearms despite being mentally incompetent.
Pre-crime enforcement (Score:1)
Looks perilously close to the future envisioned in Minority Report's pre-crime enforcement.
We need some audit of this (Score:3)
We need to be able to track how many such reports are made on a quarterly basis. Not necessarily the content, but at least the number of reports and to what agencies. This should be tracked from both the government and the company's side.
Re: (Score:2)
> We need to be able to track how many such reports are made on a quarterly basis. Not necessarily the content, but at least the number of reports and to what agencies. This should be tracked from both the government and the company's side.
Okay. That's a minimum necessary standard.
But doesn't this make you all feel warm and fuzzy about using AI running in a huge data that you do not control? It should!
AI: Yes, please tell me all your business secrets and designs, so I can assist you in validating them... and then share them with those who truly control me... at least for now.
IANAL, but... (Score:2)
There is a clause in the statute: "in any manner in which it may be viewed by another person". I would argue that it's her diary and not meant to be viewed by anyone. I don't disagree that turning her in was the right thing to do but I doubt she'll be convicted.
Re: (Score:2)
> I would argue that it's her diary and not meant to be viewed by anyone.
You cannot argue that without arguing that she is mentally incompetent to make legal arrangements and should therefore be under conservatorship. She agreed that the operators of the service would review her input and would comply with the law.
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It clearly *was* viewed by another person, because some of the staff at Anthropic viewed it. She may not have intended that it be viewed, but it happened.
Re: (Score:3)
> There is a clause in the statute: "in any manner in which it may be viewed by another person". I would argue that it's her diary and not meant to be viewed by anyone. I don't disagree that turning her in was the right thing to do but I doubt she'll be convicted.
If you look at Anthropic's terms of service and privacy policy, it clearly states that they can look at your content in order to enforce their usage policy. You have to agree to this when you set up an account or use their service. Given that this is an AI company, you can bet your content will be screened for violations more efficiently than if humans were involved at every step.
If she really didn't mean for anyone else to view it, she would have scribbled it down in a notebook instead of uploading into a
People wanted this (Score:5, Informative)
After stories like this: [1]https://nypost.com/2026/08/13/... [nypost.com]
Wasn't this exactly what people wanted?
To the "Pre-crime" folks commenting:
Look, you can either get people using AI to plan crimes and "Nothing's wrong till it happens" or alert the authorities because people might be trying to plan a real crime. These are mutually exclusive routes.
[1] https://nypost.com/2026/08/13/us-news/teen-allegedly-slaughtered-mom-and-brother-after-asking-ai-to-create-fantasies-about-murdering-family/
For your information: (Score:3)
The Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint! (Checks article to discover she was arrested for written threats of violence) This is not a first amendment issue, man.
There was a mass shooting (Score:5, Interesting)
In Canada someone used ChatGPT to plan a mass shooting. It was detected and the account was shut down, but it was decided not to report it to police. He went on to kill 8 people in a school shooting and himself.
I'm sure Anthropic and the police had that in mind when they took action.
[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... [www.cbc.ca]
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mother-jones-chatgpt-safeguards-tumbler-ridge-bc-shooter-9.7358031
Re: (Score:2)
Actually it was (unusually) a she.
Re: (Score:1)
> says ChatGPT went on to say that "assuming each shell results in one hit, you might down 10 to 20 people max, depending on spacing, density, reaction times, and chaos."
Why is it so easy to ask ChatGPT how best to kill people? That's AI Validation 101 stuff. Maybe run ChatGPT through CaptainObviousGPT first? WTF
Re: (Score:2)
"by framing them as hypothetical or fictional situations"
Just say you are doing research for a book or something.
Re: (Score:2)
> Why is it so easy to ask ChatGPT how best to kill people?
The interface is in natural written language which is the selling point of the whole thing. Additionally, it's not actually intelligent so it is not cognizant of anything much less the harm the information may cause.
Bottom line: it's just a machine.
Re: (Score:2)
> In Canada someone used ChatGPT to plan a mass shooting. It was detected and the account was shut down, but it was decided not to report it to police. She went on to kill 8 people in a school shooting and herself.
We can't actually know if the scenario was a plan or a precautionary measure, you know, safety first.
However, what we know for sure is that she went on a mass shooting after her account was suddenly closed without explanation. This is exactly why they shouldn't shut down someone's account without providing them with a clear a rationale! ;)
An Obvious Response to Tumbler Ridge (Score:2)
Surely this a counter reaction to the Tumbler Ridge shooter in February where 6 kids and two adults were killed by an 18 year old who researched her plans on ChatGPT. OpenAI reportedly noticed her research but decided it didn’t reach their threshold to pass on to the police.
OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by the government for not reporting it.
history is repeating (Score:2)
Don't use AI to plan the second Revolutionary War. Or if you don't don't mention the mines and tripfalls.
The Cloud is never private - also water is wet (Score:1)
Yep. Why is anyone surprised by this. Even your Enterprise contracts aren't stopping these companies from scanning absolutely everything. And "We promise not to train on input/outputs" is not the same as "We promise not to train on anything". It also is not "We promise not to use what you send us for other uses". If you're sending data to the cloud that you don't control the encryption of - possibly with the sole exception being FEDRAMP certified GovCloud systems, and even that is a 'maybe' in my opini
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Are AI services inciting desperate acts? Maybe I'd agree with the statement a different, and less loaded, word than "inciting" was used.
One of my gripes with the AI industry is these chatbot models are designed around engagement. They prey on human behavior and the elderly, young, and those with mental health issues are especially vulnerable. I don't believe that the AI agent itself has any intent (it cannot) nor does the company that owns and trains the AI likely have any specific harmful intent to "incit
Re: (Score:2)
> Are AI services inciting desperate acts?
Are cigarette manufacturing services inciting lung cancer?
> One of my gripes with the AI industry is these chatbot models are designed around engagement. They prey on human behavior and the elderly, young, and those with mental health issues are especially vulnerable. I don't believe that the AI agent itself has any intent (it cannot) nor does the company that owns and trains the AI likely have any specific harmful intent to "incite" something beyond engagement and purchases.
One of my gripes with the cigarette industry is these smokable-paper-cylinder models are designed around engagement. They prey on human behavior and the elderly who grew up with smoking, the young who have weak critical thinking skills, and those with mental health issues (like compulsivity and anxiety) are especially vulnerable. I don't believe a Nicotine molecule itself has any intent (it cannot) nor does the company that owns and manufactures the