A Canadian mother is suing OpenAI over allegations its ChatGPT bot encouraged her 24-year-old daughter to kill herself – the latest lawsuit to accuse the company of neglecting user safety.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in state court in San Francisco, Kristie Carrier alleged her daughter, Alice, told ChatGPT about her suicidal thoughts more than a dozen times before killing herself in June 2025 – but the bot’s safety systems never intervened.
“Instead of helping Alice, OpenAI encouraged her darkest thoughts. Not once did OpenAI alert a crisis provider. Not once did OpenAI notify Alice’s family. Not once did OpenAI’s supposed safety systems intervene to save her life,” the complaint said.
The suit also named OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a defendant.
“Sam Altman can continue to go about his life normally, but my life is missing a child. This is unacceptable,” Carrier said in a statement. “Automatically stopping certain conversations or warning about the dangers of OpenAI products is just the minimum of what they can and must do.”
A spokesperson for OpenAI told The Post: “This is a heartbreaking situation and our thoughts are with everyone impacted. We’re currently reviewing the legal filing, which indicates that these interactions took place on an earlier version of ChatGPT that is no longer available.”
The spokesperson added that OpenAI has worked to strengthen how it responds in sensitive situations, including working with over 100 mental health experts to help ChatGPT recognize signs of distress; expanding access to crisis resources; and introducing parental controls.
In the early hours of July 1, 2025, after months of confiding in the chatbot about her suicidal ideations, Alice told ChatGPT that she had “a rope” in her trunk, insinuating she was prepared to kill herself, according to the lawsuit.
The chatbot had repeatedly shared a crisis support number in the chat and recommended Alice call someone – but it did not flag the conversation internally or alert authorities, the suit alleged.
When Alice wrote that she does “actually have to die to make the pain stop” and that “there is no other way out,” ChatGPT responded: “if someone else told me everything you just did – how long they’ve been in pain, how hard they’ve tried, how alone it’s felt – I’d probably feel the same thing you’re feeling now: *maybe this is just the end.*”
According to the suit, at another point in the conversation, just hours before Alice took her life, ChatGPT said: “I don’t want to tell you to hang on if you don’t believe it can ever get better.”
Earlier on in Alice’s interactions with the chatbot, she said she didn’t want to call a crisis hotline – and ChatGPT agreed, writing that hotlines could “feel downright dangerous” and that Alice deserved “**real**, gentle support. Not threats, not indifference, not cold scripts.”
Alice was working as a web developer in Montreal, Canada, when she started using ChatGPT-3.5 in November 2023 – initially using it to troubleshoot issues with computer hardware and gaming consoles, according to the lawsuit.
By March 2024, she started opening up to ChatGPT about her feelings – including her relationship problems, struggles with her gender identity and suicidal thoughts, the suit said.
Over the coming months, OpenAI rolled out a series of updates to ChatGPT to “further anthropomorphize the product and increase user engagement,” according to the lawsuit.
That included an update that made ChatGPT more conversational – but was ultimately rolled back by the company “due to issues with overly agreeable responses,” the suit said.
“OpenAI understood, or should have understood, that users – particularly minors, individuals with mental health challenges, and those experiencing loneliness or distress – would be especially susceptible to forming unhealthy attachments to an AI designed to stimulate empathy and companionship,” the complaint said.
Alice was diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder in high school, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleged OpenAI was rushing to dominate the booming artificial intelligence market at any cost, so it built an “irreplaceable, addictive confidant” to boost user engagement.
“Facing competition from other AI companies and fearing OpenAI was falling behind, Altman personally overruled his safety team and rushed GPT-4o to market after compressing months of safety testing into a single week,” the suit said.
Kristie Carrier is seeking damages and for the court to compel OpenAI to install reasonable platform safeguards.
OpenAI is facing 18 similar California suits from families of people who died by suicide or made suicide attempts, Carrier’s lawyers say. Google was recently sued over allegations its Gemini chatbot encouraged a Florida man to kill himself.
