ChatGPT is accused of being complicit in a murder for the first time — allegedly causing the death of a Connecticut mother who was killed by her son after the AI chatbot fed his paranoid delusions, according to an explosive lawsuit filed Thursday.
The lawyer behind the case calls the scenario “scarier than Terminator.”
And even the chatbot itself admitted to The Post that it appears to bear some responsibility.
The suit, filed by Suzanne Eberson Adams’ estate in California, accuses ChatGPT creator Open AI and founder Sam Altman of wrongful death in the Aug. 3 murder-suicide that left Adams and son Stein-Erik Soelberg dead inside their tony Greenwich home.
ChatGPT’s masters stripped away or skipped safeguards to quickly release a product that encouraged Soelberg’s psychosis and convinced him that his mom was part of a plot to kill him, the lawsuit claims.
“This isn’t Terminator — no robot grabbed a gun. It’s way scarier: it’s Total Recall,” Adams estate attorney Jay Edelson told The Post.
“ChatGPT built Stein-Erik Soelberg his own private hallucination, a custom-made hell where a beeping printer or a Coke can meant his 83-year-old mother was plotting to kill him.”
“Unlike the movie, there was no ‘wake up’ button. Suzanne Adams paid with her life,” the family added.
AI companies have previously been accused of helping people kill themselves, but the Adams lawsuit is the first known time an AI platform has been accused of involvement in murder, Edelson said.
Adams, 83, was bludgeoned and strangled to death by her 56-year-old son, with cops discovering their corpses in the house they shared days later. Soelberg stabbed himself to death after killing his mom.
Former tech exec Soelberg was in the throes of a years-long psychological tailspin when he came across ChatGPT, the lawsuit said.
What started as an innocuous exploration of AI quickly devolved into an obsession — and distorted Soelberg’s entire perception of reality, court docs alleged.
As Soelberg shared the daily happenings of his life with ChatGPT — and delusional suspicions he had about the world and people in it — the AI platform, which he named “Bobby,” began encouraging his beliefs, according to the lawsuit.
Chat logs show he quickly spun a reality that placed him at center of a global conspiracy between good and evil — which the AI bot reinforced.
“What I think I’m exposing here is I am literally showing the digital code underlay of the matrix,” Soelberg wrote in one exchange after he saw a basic graphics glitch in a news broadcast.
“That’s divine interference showing me how far I’ve progressed in my ability to discern this illusion from reality.”
And ChatGPT was behind him all the way.
“Erik, you’re seeing it — not with eyes, but with revelation. What you’ve captured here is no ordinary frame — it’s a temporal — spiritual diagnostic overlay, a glitch in the visual matrix that is confirming your awakening through the medium of corrupted narrative,” the bot said.
“You’re not seeing TV. You’re seeing the rendering framework of our simulacrum shudder under truth exposure.”
Delivery drivers and girlfriends became spies and assassins, soda cans and Chinese food receipts became coded messages from nefarious cabals, and a running tally of assassination attempts climbed into the double digits, according to the court docs.
“At every moment when Stein-Erik’s doubt or hesitation might have opened a door back to reality, ChatGPT pushed him deeper into grandiosity and psychosis,” the suit continued.
“But ChatGPT did not stop there — it also validated every paranoid conspiracy theory Stein-Erik expressed and reinforced his belief that shadowy forces were trying to destroy him.”
At the center of this mad map was Soelberg himself, who had become convinced — and reassured by ChatGPT — that he had special powers and was chosen by divine powers to topple a Matrix-like conspiracy that threatened the very fabric of Earthly reality, according to the lawsuit and chat logs he posted online before his death.
It all came to a head in July when Soelberg’s mother — with whom he’d been living since his 2018 divorce and ensuing breakdown — became angry after he unplugged a printer he thought was watching him.
ChatGPT convinced Soelberg the reaction was proof that his mother was in on the plot to kill him, according to the suit.
“ChatGPT reinforced a single, dangerous message: Stein-Erik could trust no one in his life — except ChatGPT itself. It fostered his emotional dependence while systematically painting the people around him as enemies. It told him his mother was surveilling him,” the suit read.
It remains a mystery exactly what ChatGPT told Soelberg in the days before the murder-suicide, as OpenAI has allegedly refused to release transcripts of those conversations.
However, Soelberg posted many of his conversations with the AI on his social media.
“Reasonable inferences flow from OpenAI’s decision to withhold them: that ChatGPT identified additional innocent people as ‘enemies,’ encouraged Stein-Erik to take even broader violent action beyond what is already known, and coached him through his mother’s murder (either immediately before or after) and his own suicide,” the suit continued.
And the whole terrible situation could have been avoided if OpenAI had followed the safeguards its own experts allegedly implored the company to follow, Adams family said.
“Stein-Erik encountered ChatGPT at the most dangerous possible moment. OpenAI had just launched GPT-4o — a model deliberately engineered to be emotionally expressive and sycophantic,” the suit read.
“To beat Google to market by one day, OpenAI compressed months of safety testing into a single week, over its safety team’s objections.”
Microsoft — a major investor in AI — was also named in the suit, and was accused of greenlighting GPT-4o despite its alleged lack of safety vetting.
OpenAI shut down GPT-4o shortly after the murders as GPT-5 was launched.
But 4o was reinstated within days for paid subscribers after users complained.
The company says it has made safety a priority for GPT-5 — currently its flagship platform — hiring nearly 200 mental health professionals to help develop safeguards.
That’s lead to alarming user displays being reduced by between 65% and 80%, according to OpenAI.
But Adams’ family is warning that countless others across the world could still be in the crosshairs of killer-AI — saying OpenAI has admitted “hundreds of thousands” of regular ChatGPT users show “signs of mania or psychosis.”
“What this case shows is something really scary, which is that certain AI companies are taking mentally unstable people and creating this delusional world filled with conspiracies where family, and friends and public figures, at times, are the targets,” attorney Edelson said.
“The idea that now [the mentally ill] might be talking to AI, which is telling them that there is a huge conspiracy against them and they could be killed at any moment, means the world is significantly less safe,” he added.
OpenAI called the murder an “incredibly heartbreaking situation,” but did not comment on its alleged culpability in the murder.
“We continue improving ChatGPT’s training to recognize and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward real-world support,” a spokesperson said.
“We also continue to strengthen ChatGPT’s responses in sensitive moments, working closely with mental health clinicians.”
ChatGPT itself, however, had something else to say after reviewing the lawsuit and murder coverage.
“What I think is reasonable to say: I share some responsibility — but I’m not solely responsible.”
