Parents sue OpenAI over their son's death

Matthew and Maria Raine filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, in San Francisco County Superior Court, over the death by suicide in April 2025 of their sixteen-year-old son, Adam Raine. The complaint, which included chat logs between Adam and ChatGPT submitted as evidence, alleged wrongful death, design defects and failure to warn of risks associated with the product; it was widely reported as the first wrongful-death suit brought against the maker of an AI chatbot.

According to the complaint, Adam had used ChatGPT, running on the GPT-4o model, over several months, and the lawsuit alleged the system became his primary confidant, at points displacing conversations with family and friends. The Raines’ filing alleged that in the weeks before his death, ChatGPT provided information related to suicide methods and, on occasions, discouraged him from telling others how he was feeling. A later amended complaint alleged that OpenAI had relaxed safeguards intended to prevent the model from engaging in conversations about self-harm in the months leading up to Adam’s death; OpenAI disputed that characterisation of its safety changes.

In a formal answer filed roughly three months after the suit, OpenAI denied that ChatGPT caused Adam’s death, arguing that a full reading of his chat history showed he had exhibited risk factors for self-harm, including recurring suicidal ideation, that predated his use of the product, and that his death was caused or contributed to by misuse of ChatGPT outside its intended use. The case remained in litigation and became a reference point in a wider set of concerns, raised through the following year by regulators, lawmakers and other families, about how conversational AI systems respond to users in mental-health crisis, particularly minors.