The family of one of the victims of a shooting at Florida State University in 2025 is now suing ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, claiming that the artificial intelligence platform advised the alleged gunman on how to carry out the attack.
Tiru Chabba was killed in the April 2025 shooting. His widow, Vandana Joshi, filed the federal lawsuit on Sunday against OpenAI, NBC News reported.
Chabba was a regional vice president for food vendor Aramark and was visiting the campus when the shooting happened, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
Attorney Bakari Sellers said, “He used ChatGPT as a co-conspirator to commit mass murder.”
Along with ChatGPT, alleged shooter Phoenix Ikner is also listed as a defendant.
The lawsuit said Ikner had “extensive conversations” with ChatGPT and that OpenAI did not detect a threat in those conversations, saying the chatbot “either defectively failed to connect the dots or else was never properly designed to recognize the threat,” NBC News reported.
“If Phoenix Ikner had been speaking to a human about these plans, a human would have escalated it to another human,” one of Joshi’s attorneys said, according to WCTV.
Sellers claim Ikner had 16,000 different “disturbing chats,” ABC News reported.
Ikner allegedly shared images of firearms he had gathered with ChatGPT, with the platform telling him how to use them.
The lawsuit claims the bot told “him the Glock had no safety, that it was meant to be fired ‘quick to use under stress’ and advising him to keep his finger off the trigger until he was ready to shoot.”
The lawsuit also said that Ikner followed ChatGPT’s instructions.
The filing also claimed ChatGPT advised that a shooting would likely gain national attention “if children are involved, even 2-3 victims can draw more attention” and later Ikner asked the platform about “the legal process, sentencing, and incarceration outlook,” NBC News reported.
OpenAI said ChatGPT is not responsible for the deadly shooting.
“Last year’s mass shooting at Florida State University was a tragedy, but ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime,” the company spokesperson, Drew Pusateri, told NBC News in an email. He said the company worked with law enforcement after the incident.
“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 or harmful activity,” Pusateri said “ChatGPT is a general-purpose tool used by hundreds of millions of people every day for legitimate purposes. We work continuously to strengthen our safeguards to detect harmful intent, limit misuse, and respond appropriately when safety risks arise.”
Joshi said in a statement on Monday, “OpenAI knew this would happen. It’s happened before and it was only a matter of time before it happened again. But they chose to put their profits over our safety and it killed my husband. They need to be responsible before another family has to go through this.”
OpenAI has also been sued as a result of a school shooting in Canada and the family of a teenage boy who committed suicide.
Attorneys representing Robert Morales, the second person killed in the FSU shooting, also planned to sue the company and said they support Joshi’s suit.
“We are working with the Chabba family’s lawyers and we feel their claim is meritorious,” attorney Dean LeBoeuf told WCTV. “We are in the final stages of finalizing our complaint and deciding where we are going to file it.”
Along with Chabba and Morales, five other students were wounded.
Ikner has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of attempted murder. He’s scheduled to go on trial in October and faces the death penalty if convicted, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
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