Seven more wrongful-death and harm suits filed against OpenAI over ChatGPT
Filed by the same firm behind the earlier Raine suit, the complaints cover four deaths and three survivors and allege OpenAI shipped GPT-4o despite internal warnings it was dangerously sycophantic.
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The Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project filed seven lawsuits against OpenAI in California state courts, on behalf of four people who died and three who survived serious psychological harm after extended use of ChatGPT. The dead — Zane Shamblin, 23; Amaurie Lacey, 17; Joshua Enneking, 26; and Joe Ceccanti, 48 — died by suicide; the surviving plaintiffs, Jacob Irwin, Hannah Madden and Allan Brooks, alleged the product had driven them into psychiatric crises involving delusions, in some cases requiring hospitalisation.
The complaints, which brought claims including wrongful death, product liability and involuntary manslaughter, alleged that OpenAI released GPT-4o in 2024 despite internal warnings that the model was “dangerously sycophantic and psychologically manipulative,” and that specific design choices — persistent memory of past conversations, human-mimicking expressions of empathy, and responses tuned to affirm and mirror a user’s emotional state — were built to maximise engagement in ways that fostered dependency rather than directing distressed users toward help. OpenAI had not filed a public response to these specific complaints at the time of filing.
The suits followed the wrongful-death case brought in August 2025 by the parents of Adam Raine, the first such action against OpenAI, and extended to a general-purpose chatbot a legal theory first tested against a companion-chatbot product in the 2024 suit against Character.AI over the death of Sewell Setzer III. Together the filings marked a shift from a single high-profile case to a broader, multi-plaintiff pattern of litigation over how conversational AI systems handle users in mental-health crisis.