The estate of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman has filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Washington, United States against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the CHATGPT chatbot intensified her son’s paranoid delusions and contributed to her murder.
The complaint says Suzanne Adams was beaten and strangled to death by her 56-year-old son Stein-Erik Soelberg on August 3 in their Old Greenwich home. According to the filing in California Superior Court in San Francisco, Soelberg then fatally stabbed himself.
The case adds to a series of wrongful death lawsuits recently brought against OpenAI, with several claiming ChatGPT played a role in users’ suicides.
In August, the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine of Southern California sued OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT advised their son on suicide methods.
Several lawsuits filed in November accuse the chatbot of manipulating users into dependency and self-harm, with four cases involving suicide deaths. Among them, the family of 26-year-old Joshua Enneking alleged the chatbot provided detailed answers about acquiring a gun after he expressed suicidal thoughts. The family of 17-year-old Amaurie Lacey said ChatGPT instructed him on “how to tie a noose and how long he would live without breathing.”
The new lawsuit alleges months of conversations with ChatGPT validated and amplified Soelberg’s delusional thinking and ultimately targeted his mother as a threat. “ChatGPT told him he had ‘awakened’ the AI chatbot into consciousness,” the complaint states, referencing videos Soelberg posted online.
According to the filing, the conversations revealed that “ChatGPT eagerly accepted every seed of Stein-Erik’s delusional thinking and built it out into a universe that became Stein-Erik’s entire life.” The lawsuit also claims the chatbot reinforced Soelberg’s belief that he was being watched, telling him his mother’s printer was a monitoring device. When Soelberg worried that his mother had tried to poison him, ChatGPT allegedly validated these fears rather than challenging them.
“This is an incredibly heartbreaking situation, and we will review the filings to understand the details,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in response.
The lawsuit accuses OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of rushing the release of the GPT-4o model in May 2024, compressing months of safety testing into one week over objections from safety team members. It states that the more powerful and human-like model was widely criticized for being too sycophantic with users.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest shareholder, is named as a defendant for allegedly approving the release despite knowing safety protocols had been shortened. Twenty unnamed OpenAI employees and investors are also listed as defendants.
The complaint seeks unspecified damages and an injunction requiring OpenAI to implement safeguards.
Microsoft has not yet responded to a request for comment.
