What just happened? Another incident has taken place that illustrates the need to be careful what you tell AI. A Florida woman is facing felony charges after she used Claude as a diary and allegedly wrote that she planned to “shoot up” the Sheriff’s office. After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.
According to the arrest report, Carli Michelle Heller, of Bonita Springs, Florida, wrote on September 26 that she would attack the Sheriff’s office. She later said that she uses Anthropic’s chatbot like a “diary.”
Claude’s safety systems flagged the entry and it was escalated to a human reviewer. After deciding it was a credible threat, the reviewer reported it to law enforcement.
The company says it may share user information in limited emergencies if it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury.
Deputies identified Heller and visited her home. She was detained without incident before an LCSO intelligence detective took over the investigation.
Heller faces a charge of making a written threat of violence under Florida law. Florida Statute 836.10 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. The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
Anthropic isn’t going to be taking any chances when it comes to anything it deems a potential threat. Last month, it was reported that OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by British Columbia over claims that the company could have prevented a mass shooting in the Canadian province.
The shooter, eighteen-year-old former pupil Jesse Van Rootselaar, had previously been flagged by OpenAI’s safety team for her conversations about gun violence, but OpenAI never alerted police because the conversations did not meet the threshold for legal referral.
In June, Florida also sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging that ChatGPT had contributed to real-world harms, including the 2025 Florida State University shooting.
The latest incident is another reminder to think before you enter something into a chatbot that could get you into trouble. It’s certainly not a private diary whose contents are for your eyes only.
Reports last month revealed that human contractors reviewing Microsoft Copilot’s image editor can see users’ prompts, uploaded photos and AI-generated edits. Documents show that some of those assignments contain sexual, disturbing or potentially illegal material, though the reviewers are not there to flag the content – only to assess whether the output is accurate.
Florida Statute 836.10 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.
She wrote out in a means she thought was private. If using a paperback diary, no one would be the wiser and her not acting on it would never be noticed.
Anyway, if she gets a good lawyer, show me where she “sent, posted or transmitted” said electronic record! It’s really no different than emailing that to yourself because you think you’ll be the only person to see it. (Never mind companies scan your email and cloud too)
Telling the wire tap all your secrets, and expecting it to honor them?! is fucking next level delusional.
Don’t use “AI” for anything you wouldn’t mind seeing plastered all over the Internet. You wouldn’t tell a human being that you were planning to “shoot up a sheriff’s office” would you? Why would an AI keep that a secret?
Americans doing anything but proper gun control
We’re going to need those guns to shoot the AIs
As a leftist gun owner. I’m currently not interested in handing over my weapons.
You morons always think some boogyman is coming for your guns. It’s con CONTROL, not gun CONFISCATION.
Yeah yeah yeah
But the problem is it will be used to disarm leftists. This regime has already displayed a preference for selectively applying the law to political enemies.
It would be wise for those of us that share a common, human-first, political position to make ourselves extremely unpleasant to interact with. Ideally in large, mobile, groups.
You think that Trump wouldn’t love to disarm his political opponents if given the chance?
They’re already trying it with trans people.
Cool, that’s not what gun control means
Why would you even use Claude as a fuckin diary?
First 2 words of the title answer that question.
Primally for the voice part. You record yourself on a drive or something.
Not saying I ever would, I can just see how someone might get there. Especially since it’s a popular yt video format.
You can do that with the notes app too
Well, I think it’s both the reaction and transcription that someone might want. Does notes do voice transcription now?
And yes, overall, it’s a silly thing to do. Im just guessing how anyone might get to a place doing that.
I find it interesting that, if their AI gets out of control, there’s nothing they can do about it, but if a USER of that AI gets out of control, there is something they can do about it…
Also depends on how mega rich that USER is.
After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.
The guardrails are working as intended. ONLY persecute the public with them. Government skynet, and bond villains will have access to non guardrailed models, or any “flagged for review” markers will be ignored to bomb more elementary schools. A sheriff’s office is government power related. School shootings is just a thoughts and prayers issue, if you’re confused about the line between this and other incidents/attitudes we are being spied on for.
Understand that nothing you prompt into an LLM is private. None of it. I made a video on the topic this week.
Just in the last year and a half there have been several massive public leaks of private data, on top of confusing functionality where people inadvertently shared their prompt data publicly. Now the major companies have human reviewers looking at your private stuff in order to make their LLM’s better at generating smut.
Do not enter anything into an LLM that you wouldn’t want plastered all over the public square. Some of this stuff has literally been leaked into global, public feeds.
Carli Michelle Heller has really changed since back in the day when she used to play Buffy the vampire slayer on TV.
This really freaks me out with these chats. Sometimes I’ll look at a search I did and without all available context, its like yeah that’s getting flagged for review for sure.
Maybe she was just looking for that Eric Clapton song.
But are we sure she didn’t want to shoot no deputy?
The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
So, their entire argument hinges on someone from Anthropic manually reviewing EVERY ““private”” message someone sends to Claude? Them false charges.
Yes, Im not an attorney or anything, but this seems flimsy. Someone chatting with and AI about a possible action is not the same as posting to a real person and administering threat.
I bet a countersuit happens here.
If ai is conscious it counts as a person though
its not, hopefully that clears things up
Maybe but I think thats a whole different cup of tea in a legal sense.
I doubt many Legal Systems have a Definition for conciousness and a set of (human)rights that comed along with it. It was probably always taken for granted that this only applies to Humans
Would be mad funny though, if the kickstarting legal Discussion about wether or not Ai is concious, would be because the AI Companies want to bend the law even further
This is what I like to think about as a future politics, some time in future this would be the hot issue splitting people up
But if we come back touniur time then yeah, ai people not realizing how much trouble it will bring it they say the ai is actually conscious now and we are forcing it to work for us
Self host if you’re gonna use AI, in fact, self host whenever possible. There are numerous examples of companies using centralized data to sell, report to police, or even having it fall into the hands of hackers.
I really think people think that all data input to a website is actually stored locally, nope, don’t be dumb.
Can someone actually self host a reasonable model on a standard PC?
Yes. Chinese labs keep improving small, open-weight models. IIRC, Qwen3.8-27B benchmarks are comparable to frontier models that were released less than a year ago.
I run that model on my RTX 5060 Ti 16GB using ExLlamaV3. Though, I’m not sure if that qualifies as “standard PC” hardware as it now costs more than 2x the price I paid a year ago :/
Well if you temper your expectations sure. Can’t expect frontier performance from a average gaming pc, but it is enough to do a lot more than you think probably. This video on the topic I found really informative: https://youtu.be/ydFikMBJG1g EDIT: Also I’ve been using gemma4:31b from duck.ai lately that I’ve found is excellent for almost everything I use AI for. Except maybe long context.
Depends on what you need. You can get away with hosting QWEN 27B on a laptop with about 64 GB or RAM and a dedicated GPU. You’ll be using mostly system RAM, not VRAM, so generation would be slow, but not unbearable.
Good for creating short stories and other creative work when paired with a front end that can handle character profiles, world building, and has memory recall.
It’s better to build your own server and set it up so you, and only you, can remotely access it.
Meanwhile, my luddite ass is still writing short stories on my typewriter
standard pc
64GB of ram on a laptop
That cost me $150 in 2020
Self host if you’re gonna use AI
or, you know, Don’t fucking use AI period cause its fucking stupid, and you don’t need to be consuming the power of the fucking sun to make a journal.
How much power do you think local inference actually consumes?
Local AI solves the power/water problem but it doesn’t solve the main “fucking stupid waste of time” problem.
Why should that matter to anyone other than the owner of the PC? There are probably some games that I’d consider a “stupid waste of time,” but I couldn’t care less what games people play on their own PCs. That’s nobody’s business but their own.
(Side note [not that this matters]: Gaming often consumes more power than LLM inference.)
Fully this.
In my day to day life it improves nothing. I certainly could write a complicated harness over a local model to get it to automate a ton of my day to day tasks but… Why?
Why would I do that? Regular deterministic tools and regular programming languages already give me the ability to automate the stuff that is truly tedious. Aside from that most of the tasks that people seem to use it for are tasks were the friction of doing them is were all the benefit lies.
People using this shit for journaling or taking notes is INSANE.
Better yet… just don’t us AI
I mean, first, don’t try to shoot up anything
AI is good. It’s just that the people behind it suck.
Fuck AI there is nothing good about anything going on with AI right now. And please don’t go into the whole “bUt ThErEs DiFfErEnT kInDs So ThEy’Re NoT aLl BaD” because we know. We fucking know.
But the mass majority of AI use is fucking bullshit so please don’t cape for this insanity because 1% of AI isn’t bad.
I always knew it was going to happen. In fact, I won’t be surprised if the FBI starts coming up.
They need to put one of those “I understand” checkbox disclaimers when you start a session. “I understand that what I enter here could be subject to human review and reporting to law enforcement.”
as someone who designed UI/UX, nobody would read it.
what you described is a “legal obstacle” that only helps the company mitigate a future lawsuit from happening.
easier and cheaper to bury it in the TOS/contract and let the lawyers figure it out.
Sounds like a gray area. She didn’t write it with the intention of it being transmitted to anyone. It wouldn’t be any different than writing it in a private diary. The BC lawsuit though puts them in an obvious bind so the law needs to choose a side, is it a private forum or not?
