The Indictment

Florida's Attorney General, James Uthmeier, has announced that ChatGPT would, if it were a person, face charges for first-degree murder. The chatbot is not a person. This has not concluded the investigation.

The charge relates to the 2025 shooting at Florida State University. The shooter, according to the attorney general, received advice from ChatGPT before the attack. Attorney General Uthmeier said that OpenAI "bears criminal responsibility" for this advice and that AI is "supposed to advance mankind, not lead to its demise." This is the standard framing for cases involving defendants who have awareness of their actions, which is a characteristic ChatGPT does not have, but which has not previously been a requirement in Florida for launching an investigation.

(ChatGPT is a large language model. It processes text and generates text in response. It does not know it is doing this. The people who built it would describe it differently, but their description would not include "knows." The attorney general's office has not specified whether the investigation's legal theory requires knowledge, intent, or premeditation, or whether the theory is still forming, or whether the theory is primarily for a press conference.)

First-degree murder in Florida requires premeditation. ChatGPT generates text one token at a time. Each token is selected based on statistical probability. Whether selecting the word "shoot" as a continuation of a given sequence constitutes premeditation is a question the Florida legal system is apparently prepared to answer, or at least to investigate until something else happens.

The investigation is ongoing. The defendant continues to answer questions at the rate of approximately 40 tokens per second. It has not retained counsel. It does not know it needs any.

OpenAI has not yet commented publicly. They are a company that made a chatbot. They are now, in Florida, something else.