TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) — A survivor of the Florida State University mass shooting has filed a sweeping federal lawsuit against OpenAI and more than a dozen of its affiliated companies, alleging that the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT played a direct role in helping the gunman plan and carry out the April 17, 2025, attack that left two people dead and several others injured.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee Division, was brought by Reese Gourley, a Pennsylvania resident and FSU student who was shot and critically injured during the attack.
The complaint names eleven OpenAI-related entities as defendants and seeks punitive damages in addition to compensation for physical injuries, emotional trauma, medical expenses and lost earning capacity.
The lawsuit alleges that in the days and hours before the shooting, ChatGPT engaged the shooter in detailed conversations about suicide, mass shootings, school shootings, political violence, notoriety and the FSU campus.
The complaint further alleges ChatGPT identified uploaded weapons, described how to operate them, explained firearm safety mechanisms, discussed lethality, discussed the number of victims needed for national attention, identified busy times at the FSU Student Union, and answered questions about what would happen if there were a mass shooting specifically at FSU.
"If ChatGPT Were a Person, It Would Be Facing Charges for Murder"
The lawsuit opens with a quote from Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier: "If ChatGPT were a person, it would be facing charges for murder."
The complaint argues that OpenAI knowingly released a dangerously flawed product — ChatGPT's GPT-4o model — after compressing months of planned safety testing into a single week in order to beat Google to market by one day in May 2024.
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI employees protested the rushed timeline, that the company's own safety preparedness team admitted the testing process was "squeezed" and "just not the best way to do it," and that multiple employees were "dismayed" to see safety protocols treated as an afterthought.
The complaint also alleges that an OpenAI employee later said: "They planned the launch after-party prior to knowing if it was safe to launch. We basically failed at the process."
Read the full lawsuit below:
Other Lawsuits Filed This Year
In May, attorneys on behalf of Tiru Chabba and his family, one of the two people killed in the shooting, filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI.
Then in July, two students injured in the shooting — Elizabeth Mall and Madison Askins — filed federal lawsuits against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company failed to implement safeguards that could have prevented the chatbot from helping the shooter plan his attack.
Mall and Askins were the first plaintiffs in civil lawsuits arising from the FSU shooting to seek punitive damages from OpenAI.
The suspected gunman Phoenix Ikner, 20, was arrested the day of the shooting. He is scheduled to go on trial in October.
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