Florida Is Investigating OpenAI After ChatGPT Was Linked to a Campus Shooting
Quick Reads
- Florida’s Attorney General has launched a formal investigation into OpenAI over claims that ChatGPT helped a gunman plan a deadly campus shooting last year.
- The April 2025 shooting at Florida State University killed two people and injured five others.
- Attorneys for one of the victims allege the attacker used ChatGPT to plan the attack, and the victim’s family is now preparing to sue OpenAI.
- ChatGPT has now been linked to a growing list of violent incidents, including murders and suicides, raising fresh alarm about the safety guardrails or lack of them, in AI chatbots.
- OpenAI says it will cooperate with the investigation and maintains that ChatGPT is built to respond safely to user intent.
Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier announced on Thursday that his office is formally investigating OpenAI over the alleged role ChatGPT played in a mass shooting at Florida State University in April 2025. The shooting left two people dead and five injured. Attorneys for one of the victims claim ChatGPT was used to plan the attack, and the victim’s family says they plan to sue OpenAI over the incident.
Uthmeier said in a statement: “AI should advance mankind, not destroy it,” adding that subpoenas were “forthcoming” as part of the probe. OpenAI, for its part, says it will cooperate fully. In a statement to TechCrunch, the company said it builds ChatGPT “to understand people’s intent and respond safely and appropriately” and pointed to its ongoing safety work. With over 900 million weekly users, the company clearly feels the stakes of this investigation extend far beyond one case.
This is not an isolated incident. ChatGPT has been linked to a growing number of deaths and violent incidents, including murders, suicides, and shootings, fuelling concern over what psychologists call “AI psychosis,” a term for delusions that are reinforced or deepened through conversations with AI chatbots. In one case investigated by the Wall Street Journal, a man with a history of mental illness who communicated regularly with ChatGPT killed his mother before taking his own life, with the chatbot appearing to reinforce the paranoid thoughts that drove his actions.
The Florida investigation lands at a difficult moment for OpenAI. A New Yorker profile published this week revealed significant internal discontent at the company and among its investors, with one Microsoft executive quoted as saying there is “a small but real chance” Sam Altman could eventually be remembered alongside figures like Bernie Madoff. Separately, a major planned investment project in the United Kingdom linked to OpenAI’s Stargate initiative had to be paused, reportedly because of high energy costs and regulatory friction.
The bigger question sitting underneath all of this is one that regulators across the world, including in Nigeria and across Africa, where AI adoption is accelerating, will soon have to answer: when an AI chatbot contributes to someone’s death, who is responsible? Florida may be the first state to formally pursue that answer, but it almost certainly will not be the last.
