Carli Michelle Heller, a resident of Bonita Springs, Florida, is facing felony charges after she used Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot as a personal diary and wrote that she planned to ``shoot up'' the local Sheriff’s office. According to a TechSpot report, Heller entered the statement on September 26 and later told investigators that she treats Claude like a diary for recording her thoughts.
This image relates to the TechSpot report detailing how Heller's diary entry in Claude AI led to a felony charge after Anthropic reported the threat to police.
The chatbot’s automated safety systems flagged the entry, prompting a human reviewer to assess its content. After determining the message represented a credible threat of violence, the reviewer reported it to law enforcement in accordance with Anthropic’s policy that permits sharing user information in limited emergencies when disclosure is believed necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury. Deputies subsequently identified Heller, visited her home, and detained her without incident before handing the case to an LCSO intelligence detective for further investigation.
Heller is charged under Florida Statute 836.10, which 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, provided the communication is made in a manner that another person may view it. The case highlights the tension between users’ expectations of privacy when confiding in AI chatbots and the legal reach of statutes that treat AI‑mediated threats as actionable, especially as AI companies face increasing scrutiny and lawsuits alleging their models contributed to real‑world harms.