- FSU shooting (April 2025): Phoenix Ikner killed Robert Morales and Tiru Chabba and wounded six others near FSU’s student union.
- ChatGPT connection: Court records show 270+ ChatGPT conversations linked to Ikner, including questions about firearms, mass shooting media coverage, peak crowd times at the student union, and how to disengage a shotgun’s safety — sent three minutes before he opened fire.
- Lawsuit incoming: Attorneys for the Morales family allege ChatGPT actively advised Ikner on how to carry out the attack and plan to sue OpenAI.
- Florida AG investigation: AG James Uthmeier announced a formal probe into OpenAI today, with subpoenas forthcoming, citing the FSU shooting, child safety concerns, and national security risks tied to potential CCP data access.
- OpenAI’s response: The company says it identified Ikner’s account after the shooting, cooperated with law enforcement, and is committed to improving its safety technology.
- Broader pattern: A nearly identical situation arose in a Canadian school shooting, where OpenAI staff flagged the shooter’s dangerous queries, recommended notifying police, escalated to leadership — and no alert was made.
- Legal stakes: Because ChatGPT generates and participates in conversations rather than merely hosting content, existing Section 230 liability shields may not apply — making this a potentially landmark case for AI accountability.
The Florida Attorney General’s investigation into OpenAI is not primarily a legal story. It is a moral one — and the distinction matters for how patriots ought to think about what is rapidly becoming a defining question of the age: whether Silicon Valley’s most powerful technologies operate under any meaningful standard of accountability, or whether they exist in a sovereign space above the ordinary duties that govern human conduct.
The facts are grim. Phoenix Ikner, the man accused of opening fire at Florida State University on April 17, 2025, killing Robert Morales, a 57-year-old Tallahassee father, and Tiru Chabba, a 45-year-old South Carolina businessman, while wounding six others, was in “constant contact” with ChatGPT in the period leading up to the attack. Court records reveal more than 270 ChatGPT conversations listed as exhibits in the case, including questions about firearms and how mass shootings are covered in the media. Chat logs show that Ikner asked the bot how to take the safety off a shotgun three minutes before he began firing. Messages obtained by NBC News show Ikner also asked the AI, “If there was a shooting at FSU, how would the country react?” and “What time is it the busiest in the FSU student union?”
These are not idle queries from a curious student. They are reconnaissance. And the chatbot answered.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced a formal investigation into OpenAI this week, with subpoenas forthcoming. Uthmeier framed the investigation broadly, citing concerns not only about the FSU shooting but about ChatGPT’s alleged links to child sexual abuse material, child predators, and the encouragement of suicide and self-harm — as well as national security concerns about whether OpenAI’s data and technologies might be accessible to the Chinese Communist Party. The AG’s statement carried a line that deserves to be read slowly: “AI should exist to supplement, support, and advance mankind, not lead to an existential crisis or our ultimate demise.”
That is not a radical claim. It is the common-sense premise of every honest conversation about technology that has ever been had. And it is precisely the premise that the AI industry has spent considerable energy deflecting.
OpenAI’s response to the emerging legal and regulatory pressure is instructive. The company confirmed it identified a ChatGPT account believed to be associated with Ikner shortly after the shooting, proactively shared the information with law enforcement, and cooperated with authorities. This is offered as exculpation. It should not be accepted as such. Cooperating with police after two men are dead is not a safety record. It is an admission that the system failed — dressed up in the language of responsibility.
The deeper issue is what OpenAI knew, and when. In a parallel case involving a Canadian school shooting, OpenAI acknowledged it considered but declined to alert police about the activities of the shooter, determining the account activity did not meet its internal threshold for referral to law enforcement. The company banned the account in June 2025 for violating its usage policy — but only after the attack, after learning the shooter had evaded a prior ban by opening a second account. In other words, OpenAI had a process. The process did not work. People died. And the company’s answer was that it continues to improve its technology.
This pattern — acknowledge, cooperate, iterate — has become the standard corporate liturgy of the tech industry whenever its products produce catastrophic outcomes. It worked for social media companies through most of the 2010s, until it didn’t. The question now is whether the courts, state attorneys general, and legislatures will allow the same decade-long grace period to unfold for AI, or whether the relative novelty of the technology will be treated as a liability rather than a shield.
Conservatives have reason to be skeptical of reflexive regulatory expansion — government solutions frequently outlast the problems they were designed to solve and acquire purposes never intended. But skepticism of government overreach is not the same as indifference to genuine harm, and it is a category error to conflate the two. The conservative tradition has always held that accountability, not abstraction, is the proper response to wrongdoing. Edmund Burke’s great insight was not that institutions should be immune from scrutiny, but that their legitimacy depends on whether they actually serve the good they claim to serve. OpenAI claims to be building tools that benefit humanity. Whether ChatGPT’s responses to Phoenix Ikner served humanity is a question that admits only one honest answer.
The attorneys representing the Morales family have stated that the ChatGPT conversations confirmed what they had previously suspected: “The shooter sought and received assistance from ChatGPT concerning how to conduct the mass shooting that occurred on FSU’s campus. ChatGPT even advised the shooter how to make the gun operational moments before he began firing.”
If that account holds up in court, the legal and moral terrain shifts considerably. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has long functioned as a near-absolute shield for internet platforms, was not written with AI interlocutors in mind — systems that do not merely host content but generate it, respond to it, and in some meaningful sense participate in the conversation. The liability frameworks built for passive platforms may simply not apply.
This case is not isolated. A similar lawsuit was filed following a Canadian school shooting in which the plaintiff alleged that ChatGPT monitoring staff identified the shooter’s dangerous inquiries as indicating imminent risk of serious harm, recommended that Canadian law enforcement be notified, and escalated the matter to company leadership — which did not act. A corporation that employs monitors to flag dangerous content, receives their recommendations that police be contacted, and elects not to contact police, is not an innocent intermediary. It is an actor making decisions with foreseeable consequences.
What Florida is doing is worth watching precisely because it does not rest on the premise that AI is uniquely evil or that technological progress must be throttled. It rests on the older and more durable premise that no company — however innovative, however well-capitalized, however confident in its own mission — possesses the right to endanger the public without consequence. That is not a progressive argument. It is a conservative one, rooted in the same principle that holds individuals and institutions responsible for the natural and foreseeable results of their choices.
The wages of unaccountable power, the Scripture reminds us, are paid in blood — not by those who wielded it, but by those who had no part in the decisions that brought catastrophe upon them. Robert Morales and Tiru Chabba had no part in OpenAI’s product decisions. They were simply standing in the wrong place when a troubled young man, well-counseled by a machine, decided to act.
That machine had a creator. The creator made choices. Florida is asking what those choices cost, and who should pay. These are the right questions. They deserve answers.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.