Diary Entry to Deputies: Florida Woman Charged After Claude Flags Her Threats 🚨

A Florida woman is facing a felony charge after Anthropic's Claude chatbot flagged her conversations to law enforcement. Carli Michelle Heller, of Bonita Springs, was arrested after investigators found she wrote on Sept. 26 that she would "shoot up" the Lee County Sheriff's Office, according to WINK News. Her Claude account showed follow-up messages indicating she had obtained a new gun by the next day.

The arrest report states that Anthropic's platform monitors for key phrases and threatening content. Because of the severity of the statements, the messages were escalated to a human review team, which referred the case to law enforcement. Deputies identified Heller, went to her home, and detained her without incident. She is charged with making a written threat of violence and has a court date set for November.

Anthropic's consumer terms reserve the right, at the company's "sole discretion," to report a user's inputs, outputs, or actions to law enforcement. The company's privacy policy, effective Sept. 10, 2026, also allows sharing data with police when the company has a good-faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary to prevent serious harm. Even users who opt out of having their data used for model training retain that data for three months rather than five years, meaning conversations are never fully private. The same policy indicates that conversations flagged for safety review may still be used to improve Anthropic's ability to detect harmful content, so a flagged diary entry can end up as training material for future detectors.

The Heller case is not the first such referral. The San Francisco Standard reported in September that Anthropic referred a user to police after he allegedly wrote that he had bought an AR-15 and had CEO Dario Amodei in his crosshairs. An employee told officers he wasn't immediately concerned about safety and declined to show the messages, citing company policy. The user told the Standard he was joking around, and he had not been arrested or charged when the story ran. An Anthropic spokesperson called the episode "our safeguards process working as intended." The company declined to say whether it treats threats against its own employees differently.

The issue extends beyond Anthropic. Following the February school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which killed eight people, OpenAI said it had weighed alerting Canadian police in June 2025 but concluded the account didn't show an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm. OpenAI's own August 2025 policy post routes threats against others to human reviewers who may refer them to law enforcement.