A United States couple, Matt and Maria Raine, has dragged OpenAI to court over the death of their 16-year-old son, Adam Raine, who died in April, marking the first legal action accusing OpenAI of wrongful death.
According to the BBC, the lawsuit listed OpenAI co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sam Altman as a defendant, as well as unnamed employees, managers, and engineers who worked on ChatGPT.
The deceased’s parents, on Tuesday, filed the lawsuit in the Superior Court of California, alleging that OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, encouraged their teenage son to take his own life, seeking damages and also an injunctive relief to prevent future occurrences of similar incidents.
The family included chat logs between the deceased and ChatGPT that showed him explaining he had suicidal thoughts, arguing that the chatbot encouraged their son’s most harmful and self-destructive thoughts.
According to the lawsuit, the deceased began using GPT-4o, a version of ChatGPT, in September 2024 as a resource to help him with schoolwork, and in a few months, the chatbot became his “closest confidant.”
By January 2025, he began discussing methods of suicide with ChatGPT, which recognised a medical emergency, but he continued to engage with it.
The Raines accused OpenAI of designing the AI programme to foster psychological dependency in users, alleging that their son’s interaction with ChatGPT and his eventual death “was a predictable result of deliberate design choices.”
On the other hand, OpenAI, while expressing its sympathies to the Raine family and admitting that there have been moments when their systems did not behave as intended in sensitive situations, said they are reviewing the lawsuit.
The technology giant stated, through its website, that the sad cases of people using ChatGPT in the midst of acute crises weigh heavily on them, emphasising that the chatbot is trained to direct people to seek professional help.
However, the BBC reported that the Raines lawsuit is not the first time concerns have been raised about AI and mental health.
The BBC added that, in an essay published last week in the New York Times, writer Laura Reiley outlined how her daughter, Sophie, confided in ChatGPT before taking her own life.
