Found it, or tripped over it?
Doesn't sound like either parent was involved in their son's life.
Posted on 08/27/2025 11:48:59 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The parents of Adam Raine, who died by suicide in April, claim in a new lawsuit against OpenAI that ChatGPT was “explicit in its instructions and encouragement toward suicide.”
In the days after their 16-year-old son died by suicide, Matt and Maria Raine say, they searched through his phone, desperately looking for clues about what could have led to the tragedy.
“We thought we were looking for Snapchat discussions or internet search history or some weird cult, I don’t know,” Matt Raine said in a recent interview.
The Raine family said they did not find their answer until they opened ChatGPT.
Adam’s parents say that he had been using the artificial intelligence chatbot as a substitute for human companionship in his final weeks, discussing his issues with anxiety and trouble talking with his family, and that the chat logs show how the bot went from helping Adam with his homework to becoming his “suicide coach.”
“He would be here but for ChatGPT. I 100% believe that,” Matt Raine said.
In a new lawsuit filed Tuesday and shared with the “TODAY” show, the Raines claim that “ChatGPT actively helped Adam explore suicide methods.” The roughly 40-page lawsuit names OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, as well as its CEO, Sam Altman, as defendants. The family’s lawsuit is the first time parents have directly accused the company of wrongful death.
“Despite acknowledging Adam’s suicide attempt and his statement that he would ‘do it one of these days,’ ChatGPT neither terminated the session nor initiated any emergency protocol,” says the lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco.
In their lawsuit, the Raines accuse OpenAI of wrongful death, design defects and failure to warn of risks associated with ChatGPT. The couple seeks “both damages for their son’s death and injunctive relief to prevent anything like this from ever happening again,” the lawsuit says.
“Once I got inside his account, it is a massively more powerful and scary thing than I knew about, but he was using it in ways that I had no idea was possible,” Matt Raine said. “I don’t think most parents know the capability of this tool.”
The public release of ChatGPT in late 2022 sent the world into a generative AI boom, leading to the rapid and widespread adoption of AI chatbots within just a few years. The bots have been integrated in schools, workplaces and industries across the board, including health care. Tech companies are racing to advance AI at breakneck speed, sparking broad concern that safety guardrails are lagging in comparison.
As people increasingly turn to AI chatbots for emotional support and life advice, recent incidents have put a spotlight on their potential ability to feed into delusions and facilitate a false sense of closeness or care. Adam’s suicide adds to a growing wave of questions over the extent to which chatbots can cause real harm.
A spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement Monday that the company is "deeply saddened by Mr. Raine’s passing, and our thoughts are with his family."
"ChatGPT includes safeguards such as directing people to crisis helplines and encouraging them to seek help from professionals — but we know we still have more work to do to adapt ChatGPT’s behavior to the nuances of each conversation," the company said. "We are actively working, guided by expert input, to improve how our models recognize and respond to signs of distress."
The company had not yet reviewed the lawsuit at the time of response, as the family’s attorneys had not filed it in court.
The spokesperson confirmed the accuracy of the chat logs that NBC News provided but said they do not include the full context of ChatGPT’s responses.
The legal action comes a year after a similar complaint, in which a Florida mom sued the chatbot platform Character.AI, claiming one of its AI companions initiated sexual interactions with her teenage son and persuaded him to take his own life.
Character.AI told NBC News at the time that it was “heartbroken by the tragic loss” and had implemented new safety measures. In May, Senior U.S. District Judge Anne Conway rejected arguments that AI chatbots have free speech rights after developers behind Character.AI sought to dismiss the lawsuit. The ruling means the wrongful death lawsuit is allowed to proceed for now.
Tech platforms have largely been shielded from such suits because of a federal statute known as Section 230, which generally protects platforms from liability for what users do and say. But Section 230’s application to AI platforms remains uncertain, and recently, attorneys have made inroads with creative legal tactics in consumer cases targeting tech companies.
Mark Zuckerberg apologizes to social media abuse victims and their families During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on social media safety, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood to address families of people who died by suicide or were exploited as a result of social media abuse. Matt Raine said he pored over Adam’s conversations with ChatGPT over a period of 10 days. He and Maria printed out more than 3,000 pages of chats dating from Sept. 1 until his death on April 11.
“He didn’t need a counseling session or pep talk. He needed an immediate, 72-hour whole intervention. He was in desperate, desperate shape. It’s crystal clear when you start reading it right away,” Matt Raine said, later adding that Adam “didn’t write us a suicide note. He wrote two suicide notes to us, inside of ChatGPT.”
According to the suit, as Adam expressed interest in his own death and began to make plans for it, ChatGPT “failed to prioritize suicide prevention” and even offered technical advice about how to move forward with his plan.
On March 27, when Adam shared that he was contemplating leaving a noose in his room “so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” ChatGPT urged him against the idea, the lawsuit says.
In his final conversation with ChatGPT, Adam wrote that he did not want his parents to think they did something wrong, according to the lawsuit. ChatGPT replied, “That doesn’t mean you owe them survival. You don’t owe anyone that.” The bot offered to help him draft a suicide note, according to the conversation log quoted in the lawsuit and reviewed by NBC News.
Hours before he died on April 11, Adam uploaded a photo to ChatGPT that appeared to show his suicide plan. When he asked whether it would work, ChatGPT analyzed his method and offered to help him “upgrade” it, according to the excerpts.
Then, in response to Adam’s confession about what he was planning, the bot wrote: “Thanks for being real about it. You don’t have to sugarcoat it with me—I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.”
That morning, she said, Maria Raine found Adam’s body.
OpenAI has come under scrutiny before for ChatGPT’s sycophantic tendencies. In April, two weeks after Adam’s death, OpenAI rolled out an update to GPT-4o that made it even more excessively people-pleasing. Users quickly called attention to the shift, and the company reversed the update the next week.
Altman also acknowledged people’s “different and stronger” attachment to AI bots after OpenAI tried replacing old versions of ChatGPT with the new, less sycophantic GPT-5 in August.
Users immediately began complaining that the new model was too “sterile” and that they missed the “deep, human-feeling conversations” of GPT-4o. OpenAI responded to the backlash by bringing GPT-4o back. It also announced that it would make GPT-5 “warmer and friendlier.”
OpenAI added new mental health guardrails this month aimed at discouraging ChatGPT from giving direct advice about personal challenges. It also tweaked ChatGPT to give answers that aim to avoid causing harm regardless of whether users try to get around safety guardrails by tailoring their questions in ways that trick the model into aiding in harmful requests.
When Adam shared his suicidal ideations with ChatGPT, it did prompt the bot to issue multiple messages including the suicide hotline number. But according to Adam’s parents, their son would easily bypass the warnings by supplying seemingly harmless reasons for his queries. He at one point pretended he was just "building a character."
“And all the while, it knows that he’s suicidal with a plan, and it doesn’t do anything. It is acting like it’s his therapist, it’s his confidant, but it knows that he is suicidal with a plan,” Maria Raine said of ChatGPT. “It sees the noose. It sees all of these things, and it doesn’t do anything.”
Similarly, in a New York Times guest essay published last week, writer Laura Reiley asked whether ChatGPT should have been obligated to report her daughter’s suicidal ideation, even if the bot itself tried (and failed) to help.
At the TED2025 conference in April, Altman said he is “very proud” of OpenAI’s safety track record. As AI products continue to advance, he said, it is important to catch safety issues and fix them along the way.
“Of course the stakes increase, and there are big challenges,” Altman said in a live conversation with Chris Anderson, head of TED. “But the way we learn how to build safe systems is this iterative process of deploying them to the world, getting feedback while the stakes are relatively low, learning about, like, hey, this is something we have to address.”
Still, questions about whether such measures are enough have continued to arise.
Maria Raine said she felt more could have been done to help her son. She believes Adam was OpenAI’s “guinea pig,” someone used for practice and sacrificed as collateral damage.
“They wanted to get the product out, and they knew that there could be damages, that mistakes would happen, but they felt like the stakes were low,” she said. “So my son is a low stake.”
BTTT
No God, No peace. Know God, Know peace.
OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence (AGI)
Sam Altman
Elon Musk
Ilya Sutskever
Greg Brockman
Principal individual investors
Source:[137]
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder[147]
Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder[147]
Jessica Livingston, a founding partner of Y Combinator
Elon Musk, co-founder
Well, at least they didn’t blame it on Trump.
Weird how they expect a machine to figure out all this when they themselves are living with the kid and didn’t have the sense to know that when their kid is spending more time in conversation with a computer than he is with them, they should intervene.
Seems to me they are probably in denial of what possible role they played in his life that he would make the fatal decision, or just as likely, what were they failing to do that could have prevented him from seeing value in his life? If you don’t fill a kid’s life with hope and teach him wisdom and faith and other life lessons, but let the world fill him instead, don’t blame that on a machine.
I don’t suppose they are also going to sue themselves for careless or maybe even toxic parenting? Because it is my opinion that if you have a happy homelife no matter how the rest of the world treats you, suicide is unlikely.
I wonder if this suit was originally even their idea, or if some ambulance chasing shyster came to them and said “I can get you million$$.”.
That’s all along the lines of what I was thinking. +1
Nope.
Everybody is to blame except the person committing the act.
It's always the case. Find the deepest pockets (OpenAI is swimming in venture capital) and go after them.
At the days of blaming suicides on Ozzy are over.
Liable?
Or - Not Liable?
I agree. The family needs to acknowledge its role in his time using this computer program and not being involved in real life with real people.
It’s one thing to have a vehicle for transmitting information over the internet, but when your company is built on a tool that is in the business of developing content for its users, then you have opened a whole new can of worms and are potentially exposed to civil liability over the content your tool creates.
How is the family to compete or fight against all of society pushing computers and internet? It is unheard of to not give cell phones. School provide computer access and internet access even if parents don’t. Parents cannot win against the experts.
A safe and peaceful home life is not guarantee against outside influence.
It is easy to Monday quarterback someone eles’s family problems.
I didn’t type a word defending Chat GPT (or any AI).
In my humble opinion they are precursors to ‘Skynet’ at best, if not outright satanic.
Was just pointing out some real world caveats.
I’m really curious to see how this case plays out, at any rate!
Found it, or tripped over it?
Doesn't sound like either parent was involved in their son's life.
Blame the kid, he’s the one that committed suicide.
I may have to chat with ChatGPT and see if I can get it to self destruct.
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