{"id":177477,"date":"2025-08-26T16:36:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T16:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/177477\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T16:36:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T16:36:13","slug":"parents-sue-openai-over-chatgpts-role-in-sons-suicide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/177477\/","title":{"rendered":"Parents sue OpenAI over ChatGPT&#8217;s role in son&#8217;s suicide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide, he had spent months consulting ChatGPT about his plans to end his life. Now, his parents are filing the first known wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/08\/26\/technology\/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html?partner=slack&amp;smid=sl-share\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Many consumer-facing AI chatbots are programmed to activate safety features if a user expresses intent to harm themselves or others. But <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/2507.02990\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">research<\/a> has shown that these safeguards are far from foolproof.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In Raine\u2019s case, while using a paid version of ChatGPT-4o, the AI often encouraged him to seek professional help or contact a help line. However, he was able to bypass these guardrails by telling ChatGPT that he was asking about methods of suicide for a fictional story he was writing.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">OpenAI has addressed these shortcomings on its blog. \u201cAs the world adapts to this new technology, we feel a deep responsibility to help those who need it most,\u201d the post <a href=\"https:\/\/openai.com\/index\/helping-people-when-they-need-it-most\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">reads<\/a>. \u201cWe are continuously improving how our models respond in sensitive interactions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Still, the company acknowledged the limitations of the existing safety training for large models. \u201cOur safeguards work more reliably in common, short exchanges,\u201d the post continues. \u201cWe have learned over time that these safeguards can sometimes be less reliable in long interactions: as the back-and-forth grows, parts of the model\u2019s safety training may degrade.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These issues are not unique to OpenAI. Character.AI, another AI chatbot maker, is also <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2024\/10\/23\/lawsuit-blames-character-ai-in-death-of-14-year-old-boy\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">facing a lawsuit<\/a> over its role in a teenager\u2019s suicide. LLM-powered chatbots have also been linked to cases of <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/08\/25\/ai-sycophancy-isnt-just-a-quirk-experts-consider-it-a-dark-pattern-to-turn-users-into-profit\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AI-related delusions<\/a>, which existing safeguards have struggled to detect.<\/p>\n<p>Techcrunch event<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide, he had spent months consulting ChatGPT about his plans to end&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":177478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,302,339,305,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-177477","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-chatgpt","10":"tag-in-brief","11":"tag-openai","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115096045762543333","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}