The family of a man killed in a 2025 shooting at Florida State University has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in a United States court, alleging that the shooter was assisted by ChatGPT in planning the attack.
Tiru Chabba’s family filed the lawsuit on Sunday in Florida federal court against the company and the man accused in the shooting, Phoenix Ikner. It is at least the second lawsuit filed in the US that accuses OpenAI of facilitating a mass shooting.
The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT acted as a co-conspirator in the shooting because Ikner planned and carried out the attack using information provided by ChatGPT in conversations over the previous months.
The lawsuit, which seeks compensatory and punitive damages, accuses OpenAI of designing a defective product and failing to warn the public about its risks.
“Last year’s shooting at Florida State University was a tragedy, but ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime,” OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in a statement. ‘In this case, ChatGPT provided factual answers to questions with information that could be found widely in public sources on the internet and did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activities.’
Pusateri said the company identified an account believed to be associated with the suspect after the shooting and proactively shared it with law enforcement. The company continues to cooperate with law enforcement authorities and is continually working to improve detection of harmful intent, he said.
Continues after advertising
Ikner, the son of a sheriff’s deputy, killed two people and injured four others at the school in Tallahassee, Florida, before being shot by police officers and hospitalized, authorities said. He faces two counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of attempted first-degree murder, according to court records.
An attorney for Ikner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced in April that he was launching a criminal investigation into ChatGPT’s role in the university attack after prosecutors reviewed chat logs between Ikner and the chatbot.
OpenAI said it trains its models to refuse requests that could “significantly enable violence” and notifies law enforcement when conversations suggest “an imminent and credible risk of harm to others,” with mental health experts helping to assess borderline cases.
Last month, family members of victims of one of Canada’s deadliest mass shootings filed a group of lawsuits against OpenAI and the company’s chief executive, Sam Altman, alleging that the company knew eight months before the shooting that the shooter was planning the attack on ChatGPT but failed to warn police.
