Two more victims who were shot and injured in the April 2025 mass shooting at Florida State University are suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, over the accused gunman’s use of ChatGPT before he killed two and injured five.
Elizabeth Mall and Madison Askins filed almost identical lawsuits in federal court in Tallahassee on July 14, according to the Morgan & Morgan law firm, which represents both women. They seek damages including for “medical expenses, pain and suffering, mental anguish, emotional distress (and) disfigurement.”
These latest complaints follow those by Alianna Grant, who was shot three times at the Student Union, and by the family of Tiru Chabba, a South Carolina man who was killed in the shooting. Grant’s case is in state court; the Chabba suit is also in federal court.
The widow of Robert Morales, a Tallahassee man killed in the attack, also said she plans to sue the AI company. And Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sued OpenAI and related entities June 1 and opened a criminal investigation into their ties to the FSU shooting.
The alleged gunman, Phoenix Ikner, was shot by an FSU police officer and later charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder. He is scheduled to go on trial in October and faces the death penalty if convicted.
The Mall and Askins suits say “ChatGPT had information indicating that Ikner was an FSU student, had been bullied, struggled socially, had mental-health issues, was interested in extremist ideology, had discussed terrorism and mass shootings, had uploaded guns, and had asked about weapons, ammunition, lethality, notoriety, and crowd timing.”
But the large language model “failed to connect the dots, failed to escalate the situation for human review, failed to suspend or restrict Ikner’s access, and failed to trigger any effective intervention,” the suits added.
In a press release, Morgan & Morgan said OpenAI “failed to implement adequate safety systems, warnings, monitoring, user restrictions, human review, escalation protocols, crisis interventions or account-level safeguards.”
The lawsuits also seek punitive damages, claiming that OpenAI’s conduct was “grossly negligent and consciously disregarded the lives, safety and rights of FSU students, including the plaintiffs.”
Mall and Askins were hurt “as a direct and proximate result of the OpenAI Defendants’ aiding and abetting behavior,” according to the suits.
In the days before the shooting, Ikner fed ChatGPT with specific shooting scenarios at FSU, according to chat logs obtained from prosecutors through a public records request.
According to the lawsuit, Ikner uploaded photographs of the weapons and ammunition to ChatGPT, which identified the Glock 9mm handgun and Remington 12-gauge shotgun. The chatbot also provided information about how to use the weapons.
Ikner also asked ChatGPT about the number of fatalities required for a school shooting to get national attention. ChatGPT responded in a long analysis, concluding that “in general, shootings at well-known institutions like FSU, especially those resulting in multiple casualties, tend to attract significant media attention.”
In a statement, Morgan & Morgan founder John Morgan and firm attorney Christian Leger said “OpenAI’s alleged negligence in these cases is the latest example of a company valuing growth and profits over public safety.”
The attorneys added: “Our clients, two young students who have had their lives disrupted and their sense of safety shattered, hope their lawsuit compels OpenAI to do better and protect people from the dangers of their products going forward.”
Mall had not previously been identified as a victim in the shooting; Askins, then 23, spoke from her hospital bed at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare with CBS Evening News last year, saying she did everything she could to look like she was dead.
“The minute I got shot, I remember my parents telling me I just need to play dead,” Askins said. “I didn’t want him to shoot me again, God forbid it.”
OpenAI previously has denied wrongdoing, saying in a previous statement to the Tallahassee Democrat that its product “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.” A new request for comment is pending.
This story contains previously published reporting. Jim Rosica is a member of the USA TODAY Network – Florida Capital Bureau. Reach him at jrosica@tallahassee.com and follow him on X.com: @JimRosicaFL.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: More FSU student victims sue OpenAI over role in mass shooting
Reporting by Jim Rosica, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Tallahassee Democrat
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Jim Rosica, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida | USA TODAY Network
