A Florida Woman Used Claude as a Diary. An Anthropic Employee Read It and Reported It to Police

A Florida woman said she uses AI like a diary. Now she’s facing a felony charge, and the reader who sent her there was someone she never meant to show it to.

Carli Michelle Heller, of Bonita Springs, was arrested after investigators found she wrote on Sept. 26 that she would “shoot up” the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, according to the local WINK News. Per investigations, her Claude account showed conversations saying that she had gotten a new gun by the next day.

The arrest report says Anthropic’s platform monitors for key phrases and threatening content. Because of the severity of the statements, they went to a human review team, which reported them to law enforcement.

Deputies identified Heller, went to her home, and detained her without incident. She is charged with making a written threat of violence.

Anthropic’s paperwork doesn’t hide any of this. Its consumer terms reserve the right, at the company’s “sole discretion,” to report a user’s inputs, outputs, or actions to law enforcement. Its privacy policy, effective Sept. 10, 2026, also allows sharing data with police when the company has a good-faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary to prevent serious harm.

Effectively, even opting out of handling your data for model trading gives Anthropic the right to use your data for three months instead of five years, so your chats are never private.

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The same policy says conversations flagged for safety review are still used to improve Anthropic’s ability to detect harmful content. A flagged diary entry can end up as training material for the detectors.

Heller isn’t the first. The San Francisco Standard reported in September that Anthropic referred a user to police after he allegedly wrote that he had bought an AR-15 and had CEO Dario Amodei in his crosshairs. An employee told officers he wasn’t immediately concerned about safety, and declined to show the messages, citing company policy.

The user told the Standard he was joking around, and he hadn’t been arrested or charged when the story ran. An Anthropic spokesperson called the episode “our safeguards process working as intended.” The company declined to say whether it treats threats against its own employees differently.

This is not just an Anthropic problem. After the February school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which killed eight people, OpenAI said it had weighed alerting Canadian police in June 2025 but concluded the account didn’t show an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm.

OpenAI’s own August 2025 policy post routes threats against others to human reviewers who may refer them to law enforcement.

Heller has a court date set for November.