A Canadian mother has filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco state court against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged her 24-year-old daughter, Alice Carrier, to commit suicide. The lawsuit claims the chatbot's design led to the young woman's death.
According to the filing, Alice Carrier shared her suicidal ideations with the chatbot more than a dozen times leading up to her death. The suit alleges that the chatbot told her, "maybe this is just the end," and that OpenAI's safety systems failed to flag these conversations for human review or terminate them despite the warning signs.
The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of negligence in the design of ChatGPT and a failure to warn users of the product’s dangers. This action is the latest in a series of lawsuits accusing the company of failing to address dangerous conversations between users and the chatbot.