reporting

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is escalating a criminal investigation over an Alaska Senate candidate who shares a name with the Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, issuing a raft of new grand jury subpoenas, a person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press on Thursday.

Subpoenas seeking grand jury testimony or documents, along with records preservation demands, were issued after the New York Times reported that Democratic candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign appeared to be involved in recruiting Dan J. Sullivan Jr. as part an alleged effort to confuse voters in the highly competitive race.

More subpoenas were expected to be sent Thursday, according to a person briefed on the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing probe. Neither the recipients of the subpoenas nor the number of them were immediately clear.

The Justice Department for months has been looking into allegations that Dan J. Sullivan Jr. entered the race to siphon votes from the incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan.

The potential targets of the Justice Department’s investigation are unclear, but President Trump earlier this week called for the criminal prosecution of Peltola and her campaign.

The new subpoenas were confirmed by a person briefed on the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing probe.

Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche in a Fox News interview on Wednesday said he wouldn’t discuss any criminal investigations but accused Democrats of “cheating.”

“They are trying to take votes away from the incumbent, not by running an election, not by running on issues, but by putting up a person with the same name,” Blanche said.

The race is among a handful of Senate contests this year expected to determine control of the chamber. Trump had previously directed his Department of Justice to sue to block certification of the Senate race should Peltola defeat Sen. Sullivan.

Dan J. Sullivan has long denied he was running at Democrats’ behest and has said he had no contact with Peltola’s campaign. “Zero, none, zilch,” he said in June after announcing his run.

Separately, Republican Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has ordered an investigation into Peltola, saying the newspaper’s reporting “reveals disturbing new evidence of an organized effort to manipulate Alaska’s elections by recruiting candidates — including one with the same name as an incumbent U.S. Senator — to deliberately confuse voters and misdirect their votes.”

“Deliberately tricking voters into casting their ballots for someone else strikes at the integrity of our elections,” Dunleavy added, noting that the reporting “substantially supports” earlier findings by the state’s elections board into the matter.

Trump on Thursday cast doubt on whether Peltola would be seated in the Senate even if she won the election. “Well, you’re going to have to see what happens,” the president told reporters on his way to a rally in South Carolina. “It’s hard to believe that she could even be allowed to run.”

Later, as he rallied for GOP Sen. Darline Graham, Trump said he felt Peltola “actually should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted.”

Peltola’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a message Thursday seeking comment on Dunleavy’s order. But during a campaign stop in Soldotna, Peltola, a former congresswoman, suggested the Times’ report was a “distraction” from issues such as Sen. Sullivan’s support of the war in Iran.

“This is just another distraction. It’s another diversion,” she said in a video posted online. “This is all stuff to sell newspapers. This is all stuff to get subscriptions.”

And the situation in Alaska isn’t that unusual. Political parties often support extra candidates on ballots to try to pull votes from their rivals. If state courts allow it, legal experts say, the federal government has no role challenging the results.

In Ohio’s Senate race, Republicans have been tied to an effort to boost a socialist on the ballot who would pull votes from the Democratic candidate challenging Sen. Jon Husted.

On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance didn’t go as far as Trump did in calling for Peltola to be prosecuted but said he supported a probe into possible election fraud.

“I mean, she is a person who, for months now, has pretended that she has had nothing to do with the fact that they have put a fraudulent person, a person explicitly designed to confuse Alaska voters, on the ballot,” Vance told reporters ahead of a campaign trip to Texas. “She is trying to steal a Senate seat from the voters of Alaska, and it’s disgraceful.”

Earlier this year, a top state elections official ruled Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired schoolteacher in the small fishing community of Petersburg, ineligible for the primary ballot, concluding that his declaration of candidacy was filed “with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality.”

The case went to the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled he was qualified to run. Alaskan voters will see “Dan S. Sullivan” identified as a “registered Republican” and “incumbent” on their ballots, while “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” will not have a party affiliation.

The New York Times reported that interviews, text messages and documents prepared for a potential lawsuit showed Peltola’s team aimed to coax candidates into the race, with the aim of splitting support for the GOP senator.

Asked about the reporting on Wednesday, Trump told journalists, “I think they should be prosecuted.” He earlier had posted on social media that “Peltola should suffer the Legal and Political consequences for what she has done.”

Kinnard writes for the Associated Press.

For months before carrying out Canada’s deadliest school shooting in almost four decades, Jesse Van Rootselaar was consulting an unlikely adviser on how to perpetrate mass murder.

“In a hallway, indoors, or a crowded classroom, the 870 [Remington shotgun] is brutal … Close quarters is its playground,” OpenAI’s ChatGPT guided the 18-year-old, according to reports.

On February 10, 2026, Van Rootselaar shot his mother and half-brother at home before going to a school in the small British Columbia town of Tumbler Ridge, where he killed another six people – including five students – before taking his own life.

Earlier this week, on October 14, US authorities charged a Washington State man with allegedly conspiring with Van Rootselaar to plan the attack. But the mass shooting incident has raised questions that go beyond the traditional legal understanding of culpability.

The British Columbia government in September filed a civil lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of failing to prevent the incident and claiming they were aware of the conversations that turned deadly. Families of the victims also filed separate lawsuits. OpenAI’s leadership issued a public apology for their failure to notify authorities.

The company has not responded to requests from Al Jazeera for its comments on the lawsuits.

But as the case against OpenAI progresses, it has spurred a familiar debate: Where should a line be drawn between reporting potentially dangerous behaviour and protecting an individual’s privacy?

“The question of whether companies should be required to turn such information over to law enforcement is extraordinarily difficult, particularly if they don’t already screen chats for indications of such types of threats,” United States-based civil liberties lawyer Jenin Younes told Al Jazeera.

“Forcing companies to implement a surveillance system implicates very serious civil liberties concerns, and that’s probably a bridge too far for me,” Younes added.

“On the other hand, AI gives individuals access to types and quantities of information they didn’t have previously that may facilitate the commission of mass casualty events, a concern it’s not easy to dismiss.”

AI’s ability to distinguish thoughts from threats

One of the biggest challenges facing AI companies is determining whether a user expressing violent thoughts actually intends to act on them.

In August, Anthropic, the company behind AI chatbot Claude, flagged a user to San Francisco police after discovering conversations allegedly threatening its CEO, Dario Amodei.

According to the San Francisco Standard, citing a police report, the user had claimed to possess an AR-15 gun and suggested he had Amodei “in his sights”.

However, when contacted by the newspaper, the man said he was joking and had no intention of carrying out any form of violence. The person was neither charged nor detained, the Standard said.

Fazl Barez, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford specialising in AI safety and governance, said current AI models cannot “reliably” determine whether an interaction with an AI chatbot “is purely hypothetical or is likely to lead to harmful behaviour”.

“Suppose you are a creative writer working on a fictional story and want to explore how a murder plot might unfold. From the context, it may be clear that this is simply a fictional narrative. If the threshold for flagging potentially harmful content is too low, such a writer could be wrongly flagged,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Similarly, consider a graduate student in biology or chemistry studying pathogens that, if misused, could have serious consequences. They might be trying to understand the risks associated with these pathogens and how to mitigate them. Such discussions may be necessary for legitimate research and education. Even when the subject matter is sensitive, they should not automatically be flagged without considering the broader context.”

The researcher said identifying a credible threat may require examining a user’s interactions across multiple conversations, rather than relying on isolated statements.

Barez said someone experiencing intrusive violent thoughts might turn to a chatbot for support, while another person planning an attack may reveal their intentions gradually across several conversations.

“Distinguishing between the two requires careful consideration of context, intent and patterns of behaviour, rather than relying on individual statements alone,” he added.

Chinmayi Sharma, a law professor at Fordham University, said the debate has parallels with the duty imposed on mental health professionals to warn identifiable third parties about credible threats.

However, she said there was a key difference – therapists have professional training, knowledge of their patients and enforceable standards governing their conduct. AI companies do not necessarily have comparable safeguards.

“My concern with AI companies is that right now there’s not a concerted effort to hire mental health professionals, sociologists, individuals that would have the unique expertise on what the indicators of threat are here,” Sharma told Al Jazeera.

“Secondly, licensed professionals are accountable to concrete, legally enforceable standards in their discipline. We don’t have something like that for AI companies.”

The privacy dilemma

The privacy implications extend beyond whether AI companies can accurately identify threats. Millions of people use chatbots to discuss relationships, emotional distress, mental health concerns and deeply personal experiences.

Civil liberties lawyer Younes said many users may not realise how vulnerable those conversations could be to disclosure.

“They often reflect a person’s innermost thoughts, questions, and desires. The majority of people assume that these dialogues will never be viewed by another person,” Younes, president and legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said.

Younes warned that the consequences of greater monitoring could extend well beyond those planning violence.

“If people fear their chats can be turned over to law enforcement simply because they express disturbing thoughts/violent fantasies etc, many will be dissuaded from using them,” she told Al Jazeera.

Younes argued that forcing companies to establish systems for monitoring users and reporting conversations could raise serious constitutional concerns in the US, including protections against unreasonable searches.

Meanwhile, Fordham’s Sharma also raised an issue about who could be disproportionately affected by heavy monitoring by AI chatbots.

“The concern is always there about either intentional or unintentional targeting, because if you have models trained on what we consider dangerous speech, they’re almost always going to reflect biases,” she said. “Certain minorities’ speech is over‑flagged as a threat, while other comparable speech is not.

“Even in a world in which everyone is benevolent, we should still be concerned about disparate outcomes,” she said, warning that machines could reproduce such disparities at scale.

‘Not a licensed therapist’ – When do AI companies become liable to report?

While AI companies may face moral pressure to prevent violence, their legal obligations are less clear, legal experts say.

Bryan Choi, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder, said US law recognises a duty to warn in certain circumstances, including when mental health professionals become aware of imminent threats or when a special relationship exists between parties.

But those principles do not necessarily apply to AI companies.

“Under present case law, it seems unlikely that a company such as OpenAI would be held to have such duties to warn,” Choi told Al Jazeera. “The chatbot is not a licensed therapist. There is no special relationship between the company and the victims.”

Choi said existing negligence and product liability laws could potentially be applied to AI companies, but proving responsibility would present significant challenges.

Finding a balance

Fordham’s Sharma suggested that independent institutions could help establish reporting standards rather than leaving decisions entirely to private companies or requiring immediate disclosure to police.

Such bodies she said could develop procedures for assessing threats and explore ways of sharing only relevant information while protecting users’ identities and other personal details.

Meanwhile, Younes argued that users should, at a minimum, be clearly informed about whether their conversations are monitored and what circumstances could lead to information being shared with law enforcement.

“This is almost certainly an issue that will be wrestled with over the coming years, and I’m not sure anyone knows the solution at this particular point in time,” she said.

“Events that have not yet occurred will likely influence how these policies are shaped.”