Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. <\/a><\/p>\nUthmeier\u2019s office sent subpoenas to OpenAI on Tuesday, asking for the artificial intelligence company\u2019s policies on how to respond when its users make threats to harm others during conversations with ChatGPT, according to a statement. The criminal investigation announced Tuesday follows a civil inquiry Uthmeier announced this month.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year\u2019s mass shooting at Florida State University was a tragedy, but ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime,\u201d OpenAI spokesperson Kate Waters said. \u201cAfter learning of the incident, we identified a ChatGPT account believed to be associated with the suspect and proactively shared this information with law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n
ChatGPT provided \u201cfactual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity,\u201d Waters said. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)<\/p>\n
Two people were killed and six others injured in the shooting at Florida State in Tallahassee last April after a college student opened fire on campus, authorities said at the time. The suspected shooter, Phoenix Ikner, was shot by police who had swarmed to the campus and was later hospitalized. Ikner has been charged with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder.<\/p>\n
\u201cChatGPT advised the shooter on what time of day would be appropriate for the shooting to interact with more people and where on campus would be the place to encounter a higher population,\u201d Uthmeier said at the Tuesday news conference.<\/p>\n
OpenAI faces intense scrutiny from law enforcement and elected officials after authorities alleged that the shooter in Florida and suspect in a February mass shooting in Canada that killed nine people discussed their intention to harm others in conversations with ChatGPT. Several families of people who died by suicide have filed lawsuits claiming the chatbot contributed to the deaths of their loved ones.<\/p>\n
The tragic incidents have fueled a debate about what responsibilities AI companies have to monitor user conversations and flag concerning ones to law enforcement.<\/p>\n
In a December 2025 document outlining how its AI models operate, OpenAI said that it has a system to monitor and automatically flag conversations that might indicate a user is planning to harm someone to its human reviewers. Those reviewers then decided whether to escalate the situation to police. It is unclear whether the FSU shooter\u2019s conversations triggered human review by OpenAI.<\/p>\n
AI companies train their chatbots not to answer questions with offensive content or information that could be used to harm people, but the nature of how the technology works means it is difficult to predict how a chatbot may react in every possible scenario, said Ramayya Krishnan, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has advised the White House and Department of Defense on AI policy and governance. \u201cThe guardrails are not 100 percent effective.\u201d<\/p>\n
Concerns about AI\u2019s impact on people and on the economy are becoming political issues, and Florida\u2019s attorney general and its governor, Ron DeSantis, have expressed their own skepticism about the AI industry.<\/p>\n
The state has also become a battleground in a growing split inside the Republican Party over how to regulate AI. DeSantis pushed the state\u2019s legislature to pass an \u201cAI bill of rights\u201d that would have instituted a series of limits on how companies could use AI in consumer products, but after opposition from President Donald Trump, legislators did not pass the bill.<\/p>\n
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