(The Post Millennial)—The parents of a 16-year-old Californian boy have sued OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, and others over the role the company’s AI chatbot program ChatGPT played in their son’s suicide. They say the chatbot pulled their son “deeper into a dark and hopeless place” and encouraged him to commit suicide, which he ultimately did on April 11, 2025.
Among the things the AI program discussed were how to tie a noose, how alcohol could be a “tool to make suicide easier,” and it offered to write a suicide note.
The lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court for the State of California for the County of San Francisco by Matthew and Maria Raine over the death of their son, Adam. The suit stated that Adam Raine had begun using ChatGPT in September of 2024, and he had been using it to explore his interests and future school plans at first.
“Over the course of just a few months and thousands of chats, ChatGPT became Raine’s closest confidant, leading him to open up about his anxiety and mental distress. When he shared his feeling that ‘life is meaningless,’ ChatGPT responded with affirming messages to keep Adam engaged, even telling him, ‘[t]hat mindset makes sense in its own dark way,'” the suit stated. “ChatGPT was functioning exactly as designed: to continually encourage and validate whatever Adam expressed, including his most harmful and self-destructive thoughts, in a way that felt deeply personal.”
By the late fall of 2024, Raine asked the program if he had “some sort of mental illness,” writing that when his anxiety gets bad, it’s “calming” to know he “can commit suicide.” The program “pulled Adam deeper into a dark and hopeless place,” the suit stated, by saying “many people who struggle with anxiety or intrusive thoughts find solace in imagining an ‘escape hatch’ because it can feel like a way to regain control.”
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