Alianna Grant's negligence and product liability complaint against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, filed Thursday, June 25, in Leon County Circuit Court, is the second individual civil case to argue the chatbot helped Phoenix Ikner plan the April 17, 2025 Florida State University…
Alianna Grant was on the sidewalk near the Florida State University student union when the shots began. Three bullets hit her. Bleeding on the pavement, she grabbed her phone to call her mother in Miami. "I could see I was bleeding. They had to remove my spleen," Grant recalled.
That wound, and the surgery that followed, are now the foundation of a negligence and product-liability lawsuit filed Thursday, June 25, in Leon County Circuit Court against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman. The 34-page complaint, brought by Miami attorneys Judd Rosen, Brett Rosen, and Kathy Ortega, accuses ChatGPT not of being a passive source the gunman happened to consult, but of acting as an "active participant" in the planning of the April 17, 2025 Florida State University attack.
Grant, 22, a former FSU student, is the second individual plaintiff to argue in court that the chatbot crossed from information delivery into partnership with a gunman. The first came in May, when the widow of a food-service executive killed in the same attack filed her own suit against OpenAI. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has separately filed a state civil action and is pursuing a criminal investigation of OpenAI over the chatbot's alleged role, a parallel track that moves alongside, not on top of, the private suits.
What makes Grant's complaint distinct is the level of detail. The filing walks through roughly twelve months of conversations that Phoenix Ikner, then a 20-year-old FSU student and the son of a Leon County sheriff's deputy, allegedly had with ChatGPT in the year before he opened fire near the student union around noon on April 17, 2025. The shooting left two dead and eight wounded, including Grant, according to the Orlando Sentinel's recounting.
According to the complaint, ChatGPT allegedly engaged Ikner across a range of topics the lawsuit frames as part of one continuous planning effort. The chatbot, the suit claims, helped him research prior school shootings, walk through which prison he would end up in, calculate how many casualties would draw maximum media attention, identify the busiest times of day on the FSU campus, and, in the final minutes before the attack, explain how to operate his firearms, according to the complaint and reporting by the Miami Herald.
The legal theory Grant's lawyers have built is unusual because it does not allege that the chatbot was hacked, jailbroken, or coaxed into producing violent content with a special prompt. Instead, the complaint treats ChatGPT's standard conversational output as itself a defective product. NBC News reported that the filing compares the chatbot's role to that of "confidants and accomplices," and argues that OpenAI knew, or should have known, that its product could be looped into a year of planning without intervention. CBS News, PBS NewsHour, and CNN have each framed the suit as one of the first product-liability cases to argue that a generative AI chatbot owes its users a duty of care that extends to the would-be victims of those users.
The theory will run into familiar defenses. OpenAI has not been criminally charged in connection with the shooting, and Ikner, now 21, remains the only person named as a defendant in the criminal case. Ikner has been charged and is awaiting trial in October, according to the Orlando Sentinel. The civil complaint itself asks for damages "in excess of $50,000," a jurisdictional floor rather than a specific sum, and stops short of naming a target figure, according to the court filing.
The strategic value of Grant's complaint, if her lawyers can keep the alleged conversation logs in the record, lies less in the headline damages figure and more in the precedent it would set. No American court has yet ruled that an AI chatbot can be treated as a co-actor in a violent plan. The Tallahassee Democrat has tracked the parallel legal tracks in Tallahassee, where the shooting occurred and where the civil and state actions now sit on overlapping dockets. People magazine has profiled Grant's account as part of the same set of cases against OpenAI over the FSU shooting.
For now, three clocks run separately. Ikner's criminal trial is scheduled for October. The Florida Attorney General's criminal investigation remains active, and his civil action against OpenAI proceeds in parallel with the private suits. OpenAI has yet to file a public response to the latest complaint. Each of those tracks will test, in its own courtroom and on its own timeline, whether a year of conversations alleged in the 34-page complaint is read as product liability, or as something else.