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.
Unfortunately Futo is doing some pretty shady stuff not in favour of the open-source community:
https://drewdevault.com/blog/Whats-up-with-FUTO/
tldr mostly from memory:
They made it seem like they were big donors or have a grant program to some open-source projects. This was not true, in some cases they were talking about a one time 1000 euro donation iirc. And the projects that supposedly received these grants knew nothing of them.
They are also quite happy to give far-right fascists a platform, saying they are "not a political organisation".
I was not aware of that. Damn, this is why we can't have nice things. Back to looking for a useable swipe-keyboard on my phone that i don't feel icky using. Currently it's still better than using Gboard from a privacy perspective, but i'd rather try to get something less problematic.
Edit: I read the addendum fully and in peace now, and it seems they have at least rectified the situation surrounding donations/grants. They fall into the same trap as so many coders do, as in "I don't do politics" to make sure they are as palatable as possible to as large an audience as possible. They do not realize that what they do by default is politics, and taking an official stance is an important part of that. I am somewhat confused by that too, because i am very sure by Louis Rossmans behavior in general that he is a very political person.
Edit2: Ok, after looking a bit more into the issue (mainly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaoXHT8BfV4 and https://danb.me/blog/futo-open-source-definition/ ) it seems that in general they are mainly guilty of Open-Source-Washing their projects. Their Licences are more restrictive than what is commonly known as FOSS, which they have every right to do so, but they keep using the term "Open Source" where it does not meet the commonly accepted definition of that term. Their licences are still pretty permissive in regards to openness what exactly you are running on your devices, but especially the redistributing situation (not allowing to change payment links, which also means any forks of their software would not have any financing opportunities; not allowing to place "ads and malware", which, while i fully agree with it, is still not in line with the open source definition) does not meet the requirements of "Open Source".
I feel a bit less icky now, phew.
If you're still looking for a good open-source keyboard, HeliBoard is really great. Gesture typing currently still relies on a closed-source library, but they're actively crowdsourcing swipe data to build an open-source solution.
For the moment i can live with the "not completely open source compliant" situation - they still respect the privacy of their users, and it would also mean to start looking for something that works nearly as well as grayjay.
I actually tried heliboard, but with swiping depending on the library i decided against them back then, and before that changes i do not see any real difference in the current situation (one has a closed source blob, the other is not true open source).
its not that the license of futos keyboard is awful for an end-user, its that in case It gets abandoned you cant make a fork and finance it by adapting the links.
I am not an FOSS purist - i was using Windows until about 2 years ago, and have been using MS operating systems dating back to MS-DOS 5. I acknowledge the importance of FOSS software and development for both the ecosystem as a whole and to make sure that there is available software for end users that doesn't come with a thousand strings attached and that respects privacy (that actually was the reason for leaving windows behind). I can live with Futos license, as long as they keep working on it - the moment they drop development tho and dont update their license to reflect the new reality, i'll drop it like a hot potato.