By Diana Novak Jones<\/p>\n
May 11 (Reuters) – The family of a man killed in a 2025 mass shooting at Florida State University has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in a U.S. court, claiming the shooter \u200cwas aided by ChatGPT in planning the attack.<\/p>\n
The family of Tiru Chabba filed the lawsuit on Sunday \u200cin Florida federal court against the company and the man charged in the shooting, Phoenix Ikner. It is at least the second lawsuit filed in \u200bthe U.S. accusing OpenAI of facilitating a mass shooting.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit claims ChatGPT served as a co-conspirator in the shooting, because Ikner planned and carried it out using information provided by ChatGPT in conversations in the preceding months. Despite conversations about mass shootings, the lethality of Ikner\u2019s weapons and when the FSU student union was busiest, the chatbot did not flag or escalate the \u200cconversations, the lawsuit claims.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit, which seeks \u2060compensatory and punitive damages, accuses OpenAI of designing a defective product and failing to warn the public about its risks.<\/p>\n
“Last year’s mass shooting at Florida State University was a tragedy, but \u2060ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime,” OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“In this case, ChatGPT provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal \u200bor \u200bharmful activity.”<\/p>\n
Pusateri said the company identified an account believed to be associated \u200bwith the suspect after the shooting and proactively \u200cshared it with law enforcement. The company continues to cooperate with law enforcement and is continuously working to improve detection of harmful intent, he said.<\/p>\n
Ikner, a deputy sheriff’s son, killed two people and wounded four others at the school in Tallahassee, Florida, before he was shot by officers and hospitalized, authorities said. He faces two counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of attempted first-degree murder, according to court records.<\/p>\n
A lawyer for Ikner did not immediately respond to a request \u200cfor comment.<\/p>\n
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced in April that he was \u200blaunching a criminal investigation into ChatGPT’s role in the FSU shooting after \u200bprosecutors reviewed the chat logs between Ikner and \u200bthe program.<\/p>\n
OpenAI has said it trains its models to refuse requests that could “meaningfully enable violence,” and \u200cnotifies law enforcement when conversations suggest “an imminent and \u200bcredible risk of harm to others,” \u200bwith mental health experts helping assess borderline cases.<\/p>\n
AI companies are facing a growing wave of lawsuits accusing them of failing to prevent chatbot interactions that plaintiffs say contribute to self-harm, mental illness and violence.<\/p>\n
Last month, family \u200bmembers of victims of one of Canada’s \u200cdeadliest mass shootings filed a group of lawsuits against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company \u200bknew eight months before the attack that the shooter was planning it on ChatGPT but did not \u200bwarn police.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones; Editing by Nia Williams)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Diana Novak Jones May 11 (Reuters) – The family of a man killed in a 2025 mass…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266905,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29,1422,21152,66460,30105],"class_list":["post-266904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-florida-state-university","tag-mass-shooting","tag-mass-shootings","tag-phoenix-ikner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}