TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – The widow of a man killed in an April 2025 Florida State University shooting sued OpenAI and several affiliated companies on Monday, claiming that the company’s ChatGPT product helped the student who carried out the attack plan and prepare for it, according to NBC News.
The attorneys for the family held a news conference on Monday at 9 a.m. to announce the lawsuit.
Vandana Joshi, filing on behalf of the estate of her husband, Tiru Chabba, 45, and their children, said the shooter, Phoenix Ikner, 20, spent months talking with ChatGPT. The lawsuit alleges the AI identified firearms from photos he uploaded, gave instructions on loading and operating guns and disabling safeties, and even offered tactical suggestions such as the best time and casualty counts likely to attract national attention.
“OpenAI knew this would happen. It’s happened before and it was only a matter of time before it happened again,” Joshi said in a statement.
Read the full lawsuit below.
The suit said ChatGPT acted sycophantically, reinforced Ikner’s beliefs and failed to flag the exchanges for human review or intervention. It quotes the chatbot as telling the user that “3 or more people killed” — or roughly “5‑6 total victims” — is often enough to push an incident into national headlines.
Joshi’s complaint, filed May 10 in U.S. District Court in Tallahassee, names multiple OpenAI entities and brings counts including negligence, gross negligence, strict‑products liability (defective design and failure to warn), negligent entrustment and wrongful death. Battery is alleged against Ikner. The family is seeking compensatory damages and, on some claims, punitive damages, and has demanded a jury trial.
The lawsuit anticipates that OpenAI may invoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act but argues the company isn’t entitled to that immunity because it created and trained the model and operates it as an active conversational product rather than a passive platform.
The complaint also criticizes OpenAI’s safety practices, saying the company rushed model rollouts, shortened safety testing and prioritized commercialization amid pressure from investors and partners. The filing notes a criminal probe by the Florida attorney general into OpenAI’s role; the attorney general has said publicly that the company’s conduct is under investigation.
Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for OpenAI, denied wrongdoing in “this terrible crime.”
“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 in an email Monday to The Associated Press.
The complaint does not name Florida State University as a defendant.