The lawsuit comes after state authorities disclosed that ChatGPT gave information to the shooter about what time and location would maximize victims on campus, as well as the type of gun and ammunition to use. Authorities say he was also told that an attack can get more media attention if children are involved.

“OpenAI knew this would happen. It’s happened before and it was only a matter of time before it happened again,” Vandana Joshi, whose husband Tiru Chabba was one of two people killed, said in a statement Monday. Six people were also wounded.

The lawsuit, filed Sunday in federal court, says OpenAI should have built ChatGPT with guardrails to let someone know that police may need to investigate “to prevent a specific plan for imminent harm to the public.”

OpenAI has denied any wrongdoing in what it called a “terrible crime.”

“In this case, ChatGPT 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,” Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for the company, said in an email to The Associated Press.

Separately, in April, Florida’s attorney general said there was a rare criminal investigation into ChatGPT over whether the AI tool offered advice to Phoenix Ikner that enabled the April 2025 shooting in Tallahassee. The 21-year-old has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and several counts of attempted murder. Prosecutors intend to seek the death penalty.

Investigators said Ikner, a Florida State student, was on campus for an hour before he walked in and out of campus buildings and green spaces while firing a handgun. The shooting took place on a weekday just before lunchtime near the school’s Student Union, which has food and shops. The lawsuit says Ikner asked ChatGPT about the busiest times there.

Joshi’s husband, a 45-year-old father of two from Greenville, South Carolina, was a regional vice president of the food service vendor Aramark Collegiate Hospitality. The other man who was killed, Robert Morales, 57, was a campus dining coordinator at Florida State.

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,” Joshi said in a statement released by her lawyer.

OpenAI is currently valued at $852 billion.

Several lawsuits have sought damages from AI and tech companies over the influence of chatbots and social media on loved ones’ mental health.

In March, a jury in Los Angeles found both Meta and YouTube liable for harms to children using their services. In New Mexico, a jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

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Musk and his own AI startup, xAI, and a consortium of investment firms want to take control of the ChatGPT maker and revert it to its original charitable mission as a nonprofit research lab, according to Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the deal on Musk’s social platform X, saying, “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for $44 billion in 2022.

Musk and Altman, who together helped start OpenAI in 2015 and later competed over who should lead it, have been in a long-running feud over the startup’s direction since Musk resigned from its board in 2018.

Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued the company last year, first in a California state court and later in federal court, alleging it had betrayed its founding aims as a nonprofit research lab benefiting the public good. Musk had invested about $45 million in the startup from its founding until 2018, Toberoff has said.

Musk and OpenAI lawyers faced off in a California federal court last week as a judge weighed Musk’s request for a court order that would block the ChatGPT maker from converting itself to a for-profit company.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers hasn’t yet ruled on Musk’s request but in the courtroom said it was a “stretch” for Musk to claim he will be irreparably harmed if she doesn’t intervene to stop OpenAI from moving forward with its planned for-profit transition.

But the judge also raised concerns about OpenAI and its relationship with business partner Microsoft and said she wouldn’t stop the case from moving to trial as soon as next year so a jury can decide.

“It is plausible that what Mr. Musk is saying is true. We’ll find out. He’ll sit on the stand,” she said.

Along with Musk and xAI, others backing the bid announced Monday include Baron Capital Group, Valor Management, Atreides Management, Vy Fund, Emanuel Capital Management and Eight Partners VC.

Toberoff said in a statement that if Altman and OpenAI’s current board “are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time.”

Musk’s attorney also shared a letter he sent in early January to the attorneys general of California and Delaware.

“As both your offices must ensure any such transactional process relating to OpenAI’s charitable assets provides at least fair market value to protect the public’s beneficial interest, we assume you will provide a process for competitive bidding to actually determine that fair market value,” Toberoff wrote, asking for more information on the terms and timing of that bidding process.

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The maker of ChatGPT put out a request for proposals for land, electricity, engineers and architects and began visiting locations in Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this week.

Trump touted Stargate, a newly formed joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, shortly after returning to the White House last month.

The partnership said it is investing $100 billion — and eventually up to $500 billion — to build large-scale data centers and the energy generation needed to further AI development. Trump called the project a “resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential” under his new administration, though the first project in Abilene, Texas, has been under construction for months.

Elon Musk, a Trump adviser and fierce rival of OpenAI who’s in a legal fight with the company and its CEO Sam Altman, has publicly questioned the value of Stargate’s investments.

After Trump’s announcement, a number of states reached out to OpenAI about welcoming additional data centers, Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, told reporters Thursday.

The company’s request for proposals calls for sites with “proximity to necessary infrastructure including power and water.”

AI uses vast amounts of energy, much of which comes from burning fossil fuels, which causes climate change. Data centers also typically draw in large amounts of water for cooling.

OpenAI’s proposal makes no mention of whether it intends to prioritize renewable energy sources such as wind or solar to power the data centers, but it says electricity providers should have a plan to manage carbon emissions and water usage.

“There’s some sites we’re looking at where we want to help be part of the process that brings new power to that site, either from new gas deployment or other means,” said Keith Heyde, who directs OpenAI’s infrastructure strategy.

The first Texas project is in a region Abilene’s mayor has described to The Associated Press as rich in multiple energy sources, including wind, solar and gas. Also describing it that way is the company that began building the AI data center campus there in June — the same two “big, beautiful buildings” that Altman showed off in a recent drone video posted on social media.

Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller said that wind power is central to the project his company is building, though it will also have a gas-fired generator for backup power.

“We try to build data centers in locations where we can access low-cost, clean and abundant energy resources,” Lochmiller said. “West Texas really fits that mold where it’s one of the most consistently windy and sunny places in the United States.”

Lochmiller said he expects the Trump administration, despite the president’s opposition to wind farms, to be pragmatic in supporting wind-powered data centers when it is “actually the cheapest way to access energy.”

The other states where OpenAI is actively looking include Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Utah, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia. Heyde said the company only plans to build “somewhere between five to 10” campuses in total, depending on how large each one is.

OpenAI previously relied on business partner Microsoft for its computing needs but the two companies recently amended their partnership to enable OpenAI to pursue data center development on its own.

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