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.
Yes but not in a way she would think another person may view it, most likely. Obviously IANAL but surely intent matters here?
If people actively realised someone can read all their chats, I'm sure these services would be far less popular.
And here's the autism slop because I can't think of the proper term for "actively realising" and do not have the energy to make it readable anymore:
What I mean is, I'm sure plenty of people know in the back of their mind that their data is not protected there, but it's not the first, or second, or probably even tenth thing they think about when starting a chat.
Yeah half of the online gaming world would be in jail if this was consistently applied… intent must matter in a sane world.
https://vger.to/lemmy.world/comment/26171736
This is a link to my original comment on the subject. I did not say what you think I said in the comment you replied to or the original comment I linked. Her ignorance doesn't absolve her of her actions or the consequences. Intent does matter to some extent but there have also been a lot of news reports about how data you share with corporate LLM'S isn't private and so then the question becomes should she have known and not just if she did or didn't know.
If someone else steals something and sells it to you or gifts it to you and you had no knowledge that it was stolen you can still be prosecuted under the law for receiving stolen goods. Your intent in the matter should be considered because there is a difference between knowingly receiving something you know is stolen and not reporting it, and just getting something without knowing it's legal provenance and not reporting it. But you can still be charged either way.
In this case though an attempt was made to notify the user that her chats were not private in a EULA or TOS. They changed that TOS relatively recently (something like a year ago I think). At that time it looks like users would have been required to agree to an updated TOS with specific verbage about the sharing of chats that doesn't look like it would have required users to read the entire TOS, just the agree popup. I linked the article for that below because while that was for allowing AI to train on user data, it should have been a clue that the chats were not private.
https://www.bgr.com/1953473/anthropic-train-claude-chats-how-opt-out/
https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms