Florida woman reported by Anthropic for writing threatening diary with Claude

A 30-year-old Florida woman, Carli Michelle Heller, was arrested for allegedly making violent threats against the Lee County Sheriff's Office in a chat with Anthropic's Claude. According to Gulf Coast News, Claude flagged the conversation, after which human reviewers viewed the messages and reported them to police.

A woman in Lee County, Florida, was arrested by police and faces felony charges related to threatening content in a conversation with Anthropic's Claude chatbot. The arrest report shows that on September 26 a user said they would "spray" the Lee County Sheriff's Office, and the next day mentioned a newly purchased gun. Anthropic monitors chats for keywords and content that could be considered threatening, submitting it for human review depending on severity, and this time the team decided to report it to law enforcement. The woman was detained without incident at her residence, and the case was taken over by the sheriff's office intelligence detectives. Court records show that on September 30 a felony charge was filed under Florida Statute 836.10, involving mass shooting or terrorism threats in written or electronic form.

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.

Carli Michelle Heller of Bonita Springs, Florida, was arrested for writing content in Claude planning an attack on a sheriff's office, facing a second-degree felony charge of written threats of violence under Florida law. She wrote the content on September 26 and said she used Anthropic's chatbot as a diary. Claude's safety system flagged the entry and escalated it to human reviewers, who determined it constituted a credible threat and reported it to law enforcement. Anthropic said it may share user information in limited emergency situations when it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious bodily harm. Officers used this to confirm Heller's identity and went to her home, detaining her without incident.