OpenAI is being sued by the family of a victim killed in the April 2025 mass shooting at Florida State University that left two people dead. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI’s ChatGPT enabled the attack.

Vandana Joshi, the widow of Tiru Chabba, who was killed alongside the university dining director Robert Morales, filed the federal lawsuit against OpenAI in Florida on Sunday.

In a Monday news briefing announcing the lawsuit, one of Joshi’s attorneys accused ChatGPT of placing “the dollar above the lives of everyday average Americans.”

“The unique thing about this is we are not going to allow the American public to have clinic run on them by OpenAI and ChatGPT,” Bakari Sellers said.

The complaint also names Phoenix Ikner, the man accused in the shooting, as a defendant, citing his “extensive conversations” with ChatGPT.

The suit says that OpenAI failed to effectively detect a threat in ChatGPT’s conversations with Ikner, claiming the chatbot “either defectively failed to connect the dots or else was never properly designed to recognize the threat.”

In response to the allegations, OpenAI has denied any wrongdoing, describing the incident as a “terrible crime.”

Drew Pusateri, a company spokesman, stated via email that ChatGPT merely 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.”

The individual accused of the shooting is Phoenix Ikner, a 21-year-old Florida State student who has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and several counts of attempted murder. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Investigators detailed that Ikner spent an hour on campus, moving through buildings and green spaces while firing a handgun.

Separately, Florida’s attorney general initiated a rare criminal investigation in April into whether ChatGPT offered advice to Ikner that facilitated the April 2025 Tallahassee shooting.

The shooting occurred on a weekday just before lunchtime, in close proximity to the school’s Student Union, a busy area with various food establishments and shops.

The lawsuit specifically claims that Ikner inquired with ChatGPT about the busiest times at that particular location.

Tiru Chabba, a 45-year-old father of two from Greenville, South Carolina, was a regional vice president for Aramark Collegiate Hospitality.

The other victim, Robert Morales, 57, served as a campus dining coordinator at Florida State.

Joshi vehemently stated, “OpenAI put their profits over our safety and it killed my husband. They need to be responsible before another family has to go through this.”

OpenAI, currently valued at $852 billion, faces this legal challenge amidst a growing number of lawsuits targeting AI and technology companies.

These cases often involve allegations regarding the impact of chatbots and social media on mental health, with recent rulings against Meta and YouTube in Los Angeles and New Mexico juries finding Meta liable for harms to children.