{"id":442352,"date":"2025-12-12T12:30:23","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T12:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/442352\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T12:30:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T12:30:23","slug":"openai-sued-for-allegedly-enabling-murder-suicide-technology-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/442352\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI sued for allegedly enabling murder-suicide | Technology News"},"content":{"rendered":"

The case, filed in a California court, is the first suit linking the chatbot to murder.<\/p>\n

Published On 11 Dec 202511 Dec 2025<\/p>\n

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OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, have been sued in California state court over claims that ChatGPT, OpenAI\u2019s popular chatbot, encouraged a man with mental illnesses to kill his mother and himself.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit, filed on Thursday, said that ChatGPT fuelled 56-year-old Stein-Erik Soelberg\u2019s delusions of a vast conspiracy against him, and eventually led him to murder his 83-year-old mother, Suzanne Adams, in Connecticut in August.<\/p>\n

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\u201cChatGPT kept Stein-Erik engaged for what appears to be hours at a time, validated and magnified each new paranoid belief, and systematically reframed the people closest to him \u2013 especially his own mother \u2013 as adversaries, operatives, or programmed threats,\u201d the lawsuit said.<\/p>\n

The case, filed by Adams\u2019s estate, is among a small but growing number of lawsuits filed <\/a>against artificial intelligence companies claiming that their chatbots encouraged suicide. It\u00a0is the first wrongful death litigation involving an AI chatbot that has targeted Microsoft, and the first to tie a chatbot to a homicide rather than a suicide. It is seeking an undetermined amount of money damages and an order requiring OpenAI to install safeguards in ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

The estate\u2019s lead lawyer, Jay Edelson, known for taking on big cases against the tech industry, also represents the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who sued OpenAI and Altman in August, alleging that ChatGPT coached the California boy in planning and taking his own life earlier.<\/p>\n

OpenAI is also fighting seven other lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide and harmful delusions, even when they had no prior mental health issues. Another chatbot maker, Character Technologies, is also facing multiple wrongful death lawsuits, including one from the mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an incredibly heartbreaking situation, and we will review the filings to understand the details,\u201d an OpenAI spokesperson said. \u201cWe continue improving ChatGPT\u2019s training to recognise and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward real-world support.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spokespeople for Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Hallucinations<\/p>\n

\u201cThese companies have to answer for their decisions that have changed my family forever,\u201d Soelberg\u2019s son, Erik Soelberg, said in a statement.<\/p>\n

According to the complaint, Stein-Erik Soelberg posted a video to social media in June of a conversation in which ChatGPT told him he had \u201cdivine cognition\u201d and had awakened the chatbot\u2019s consciousness. The lawsuit said ChatGPT compared his life to the movie, The Matrix, and encouraged his theories that people were trying to kill him.<\/p>\n

Soelberg used GPT-4o, a version of ChatGPT that has been criticised for allegedly being sycophantic to users.<\/p>\n

The complaint said ChatGPT told him in July that Adams\u2019s printer was blinking because it was a surveillance device being used against him. According to the complaint, the chatbot \u201cvalidated Stein-Erik\u2019s belief that his mother and a friend had tried to poison him with psychedelic drugs dispersed through his car\u2019s air vents\u201d before he murdered his mother on August 3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The case, filed in a California court, is the first suit linking the chatbot to murder. Published On…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":442353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,438,356,79,50,158,67,132,68,72],"class_list":{"0":"post-442352","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-business-and-economy","10":"tag-courts","11":"tag-economy","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-us-canada"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115706610371657075","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442352","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=442352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}