A Bonita Springs, Florida woman, Carli Michelle Heller, was arrested after investigators said she used Claude like a diary and wrote about shooting at the Lee County Sheriff’s Office on September 26. According to ChainCatcher, she also said the next day that she had obtained a new gun, prompting Anthropic’s safety systems to flag the chats for human review and report them to law enforcement.

Police identified Heller from the report, went to her home, and took her into custody. She was charged with making a written threat of violence, and the case is scheduled for trial in November.

Anthropic’s consumer terms reserve the right to report user input, output, or behavior to law enforcement at its sole discretion. Its privacy policy, effective September 10, 2026, also allows the company to share data with police when it believes disclosure is reasonably necessary to prevent serious harm.

The company can still use user data for up to three months even if users opt out of model training, rather than five years. Chats flagged for review are also used to improve detection of harmful content.

The case is not the first involving Anthropic and police referrals. In September, The San Francisco Standard reported that Anthropic had turned over another user to police after the person allegedly wrote about buying an AR-15 rifle and putting CEO Dario Amodei in the crosshairs. Anthropic said at the time that its safeguards were working as intended.