Florida woman writes diary with Claude, reports to police after Anthropic review

According to Decrypt, Carli Michelle Heller, a woman from Bonita Springs, Florida, was arrested for using Claude as a diary. Investigators stated that she wrote about "shooting" the Lee County Sheriff's Office on September 26, and the next day claimed she had acquired a new gun. Anthropic's safety system flagged these conversations as serious, and the platform handed them over to a human review team, which reported to law enforcement. Officers then identified 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 in November.

Anthropic's consumer terms explicitly reserve the right to "decide on their own" to report user inputs, outputs, or behaviors to law enforcement. Its privacy policy, effective September 10, 2026, also allows the company to share data with police when it reasonably believes that disclosure is necessary to prevent serious harm. Even if users choose not to use their data for model training, Anthropic can still use their data within three months, rather than five years; conversations flagged for review will also be used to improve harmful content detection capabilities.

This is not the first case. The San Francisco Standard reported in September that Anthropic had referred a user to the police, who allegedly wrote that they purchased an AR-15 rifle and had the company's CEO Dario Amodei in their sights, claiming it was just a joke. At the time of the report, the user had not been arrested or charged, and an Anthropic spokesperson stated that this was "our protective process working as intended."