Over the past decade, as mass shootings have become depressingly common, school districts have increasingly invested in surveillance systems designed to monitor students’ online activity. Recently, one of those systems pinged after a teen in Florida asked ChatGPT for advice about how to kill his friend, local police said.

The episode occurred in Deland, Florida, where an unnamed 13-year-old student attending the city’s Southwestern Middle School is alleged to have asked OpenAI’s chatbot about “how to kill my friend in the middle of class.” The question immediately set off an alert within a system that was monitoring school-issued computers. That system was run by a company called Gaggle, which provides safety services to school districts throughout the country. Soon, police were intervi

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