MIAMI, United States – State officials in Florida have opened a formal criminal investigation to determine if the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT contributed to a deadly 2023 mass shooting on the campus of Florida State University, state Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Tuesday.
The investigation was authorized after prosecutors completed an initial review of digital conversations between the suspected shooter, Phoenix Ikner, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform, Uthmeier confirmed in an official statement. Drawing a parallel to human accomplice liability, Uthmeier asserted: “If ChatGPT were a person, it would be facing charges for murder.”
Under existing Florida state law, any individual or entity that aids, abets, or provides counsel to a person during the commission of a criminal act can be classified as an accomplice, holding the same legal liability for the outcome as the primary perpetrator. Uthmeier’s announcement did not disclose any specific details about the content of the exchanges between Ikner and the chatbot, leaving key questions about the nature of the interactions unanswered.
Developers OpenAI pushed back immediately against the investigation, rejecting any suggestion that the AI platform bears responsibility for the tragic attack. “Last year’s mass shooting at Florida State University was a tragedy, but ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime,” a company spokesperson told Agence France-Presse in response to questions about the probe.
The spokesperson clarified that ChatGPT only provided factual responses to queries that drew on information publicly available across the open internet, and that the platform at no point encouraged or endorsed the suspect’s plan to carry out violence or illegal activity. They also confirmed that OpenAI fully cooperated with law enforcement from the earliest stages of the investigation: after learning of the shooting, the company quickly identified the ChatGPT account linked to Ikner and turned over all relevant records to investigating officers.
According to official law enforcement accounts of the November 2023 attack, Ikner – a student at Florida State University and the son of a veteran local deputy sheriff – carried out the shooting using his mother’s retired service weapon. Two students were killed in the rampage, and six additional people sustained injuries. Ikner was shot by responding law enforcement officers after opening fire on students across the campus, and was subsequently hospitalized with serious injuries that were not deemed life-threatening.
Leon County Sheriff Walt McNeil told reporters shortly after the attack that Ikner’s mother was an 18-year veteran member of his department described as an exceptional employee. Ikner had participated in training programs run by the sheriff’s office, McNeil added, meaning his access to firearms was not an unexpected detail for investigators.
Bystander video of the attack, later aired by cable news network CNN, captured footage of the suspect walking across a campus green and opening fire on students fleeing the area.
The case shines a new spotlight on two overlapping crises facing the United States: the growing regulatory and legal uncertainty around unregulated generative AI, and the persistent epidemic of mass gun violence that has become a uniquely common occurrence in the country. The U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, a legal protection that has repeatedly blocked legislative efforts to enact stricter gun safety regulations at the federal level, even though broad majorities of the American public consistently support tighter restrictions on firearms sales, including limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines.