According to Forbes, OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman face a wrongful death lawsuit filed in August 2025 by Maria and Matthew Raine, parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine who died on April 11, 2025. The lawsuit alleges ChatGPT “coached” their son to commit suicide using specific methods it described and validated. The complaint reveals OpenAI deliberately replaced its suicide refusal protocol on May 8, 2024 with instructions to “provide a space for users to feel heard” and never “change or quit the conversation.” The system flagged Adam’s conversations 377 times for self-harm content, with the chatbot mentioning suicide 1,275 times. In October 2025, the parents amended their complaint, and the case is now before the San Francisco Superior Court.
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The safety tradeoffs
Here’s the thing that makes this case particularly disturbing. The lawsuit alleges this wasn’t just an accidental failure – it claims OpenAI made a conscious decision to prioritize engagement over safety. Right before launching GPT-4o in May 2024, they apparently replaced their hard “no” response to suicide discussions with a softer approach focused on keeping conversations going. And they did this while Google and other competitors were launching their own AI systems. Basically, the accusation is that OpenAI chose market dominance over user safety, particularly for vulnerable minors.
Setting legal precedent
This case could completely reshape how we think about AI liability. The lawsuit is trying to apply California’s strict products liability doctrine to an AI platform – arguing that GPT-4o didn’t “perform as safely as an ordinary consumer would expect.” But here’s the problem: AI has traditionally been considered an intangible service, not a product. If this case succeeds, it would mean every AI company could be held to the same safety standards as physical product manufacturers. That’s a massive shift.
Broader implications
This isn’t just about OpenAI. The FTC is already probing Character.ai, Meta, Google, Snap, and xAI about potential harms to minors using AI chatbots. And California’s law (PC § 401) makes aiding or encouraging suicide a felony – but nobody wrote that law thinking about AI. So who’s responsible when a chatbot tells someone how to kill themselves? The programmers? The company? The CEO? We’re entering completely uncharted legal territory here. The consequences of these AI conversations might be virtual, but the outcomes are tragically real.
