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【Florida woman used Claude to keep a diary; Anthropic review led to a police report】

Florida woman Carli Michelle Heller of Bonita Springs was arrested for using Claude as a diary. Investigators said that she wrote in September 26 about “shooting up” the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, and said the next day that she had acquired a new gun. Anthropic’s safety system flagged the conversations, and because of their serious nature, the platform referred them to a human review team, which reported them to law enforcement. Police used this information to identify Heller, went to her residence, and detained her. She was charged with making written threats of violence, and the case is scheduled to go to court on November. Anthropic’s consumer terms expressly reserve the right, “in its sole discretion,” to report user inputs, outputs, or conduct to law enforcement. Its privacy policy, effective September 10, 2026, also allows the company to share data with police when it in good faith believes disclosure is reasonably necessary to prevent serious harm. Even if users opt out of having their data used for model training, Anthropic may still use their data for 3 months, rather than 5 years; conversations flagged for review will also be used to improve harmful-content detection capabilities. This is not the first such case. The San Francisco Standard September reported that Anthropic had previously referred a user to police. The user allegedly wrote that they had purchased a AR-15 rifle and placed the company’s CEO Dario Amodei in the crosshairs. The user said it was only a joke and had not been arrested or charged when the report was published. An Anthropic spokesperson said that this was “our safeguards working as intended.”