Suspect in Palisades Fire Allegedly Consulted ChatGPT for Arson Tips and Legal Advice Before Blaze That Killed 12 and Destroyed 6,837 Structures
July 11, 2024
Federal prosecutors allege that Jonathan Rinderknecht, arrested on 10/08/2025, consulted ChatGPT for arson-related imagery and legal advice before and after deliberately starting the Palisades fire in Los Angeles on 01/01/2025. The blaze, which reignited on 01/07/2025, killed 12 people and destroyed 6,873 buildings. Prosecutors say he generated a dystopian fire image with ChatGPT and later asked about liability for fires caused by cigarettes.
- Alleged deployer
- jonathan-rinderknecht
- Alleged developer
- openai
- Alleged harmed parties
- general-public-of-california, general-public-of-los-angeles, pacific-palisades-community, victims-of-the-palisades-fire
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1230
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
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