Florida woman arrested for making violent threats in Claude chat

A 30-year-old woman, Carli Michelle Heller, from Bonita Springs, Florida, was arrested for allegedly making violent threats against the Lee County Sheriff's Office on Anthropic's Claude platform, facing charges of written violent threats. The platform automatically flagged the relevant messages and escalated them to a human review team, which notified law enforcement. According to the arrest report, she wrote content threatening to open fire in the early morning of September 26, and posted another threatening message with a new gun in the early morning of the next day. Officers detained her at her residence without conflict. Within the same week, officers also arrested a man who used AI-generated images to threaten Sheriff Carmine Marceno. Attorney Michael Raheb noted that such threats are not easy to prove in court and mentioned the boundary issues between hate speech and the First Amendment. Chrissann Ruehle, assistant professor of AI ethics at Florida Gulf Coast University, emphasized that technology developers have a responsibility to set guardrails and flag harmful applications.