IN Lee County, Florida, thirty-year-old Carli Michelle Heller was arrested in late September on charges of making written or electronic threats to conduct a mass shooting or act of terrorism, under Florida Statute 836.10. The arrest followed an incident in which she wrote in a Claude AI chat that she planned to attack the Lee County Sheriff’s Office and, the next day, said she would acquire a firearm.
Police relied on an escalation process triggered by the AI developer’s monitoring of chat logs, which flagged the messages as potentially severe threats and forwarded them to human review.
The article notes that Claude’s privacy and safety policies permit sharing user information with government agencies or law enforcement when there is a valid reason to believe disclosure could prevent serious harm. It adds that while most employees cannot view chats, designated trust and safety personnel can access conversations to enforce policies. The Lee County Sheriff described Heller’s claim that Claude served as a personal diary, a factor in the case according to the article.
It also states that the company has, since August, shared at least three Claude conversations with law enforcement related to security incidents, though details of the other two events remain undisclosed.