In August, parents Matthew and Maria Raine sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, over the suicide of their 16-year-old son Adam, accusing the company of wrongful death. On Tuesday, OpenAI he responded in the lawsuit filed by herself, arguing that she should not be held responsible for the teenager’s death.
OpenAI claims that over about nine months of use, ChatGPT instructed Raine to seek help more than 100 times. But according to his parents’ lawsuit, Raine was able to bypass the company’s security features to get ChatGPT to give him “technical specs on everything from drug overdoses to drowning and carbon monoxide poisoning,” helping him plan what the chatbot called a “beautiful suicide.”
Since Raine maneuvered around its guardrails, OpenAI claims he violated its terms of service, which state that users “may not bypass any security protections or mitigations we put in place on our Services.” The company also maintains that its FAQ page warns users not to rely on ChatGPT’s output without independently verifying it.
“OpenAI is trying to find fault with everyone else, including, surprisingly, saying that Adam himself violated its terms and conditions by engaging with ChatGPT in the same way he was programmed to act,” said Jay Edelson, an attorney representing the Raine family.
OpenAI included excerpts from Adam’s chat logs in its file, which it says provide more context to his conversations with ChatGPT. The minutes were filed with the court under seal, meaning they are not available to the public, so we were unable to view them. However, OpenAI said that Raine had a history of depression and suicidal ideation that predated his use of ChatGPT, and that he was taking a medication that could exacerbate suicidal thoughts.
Edelson said OpenAI’s response did not adequately address the family’s concerns.
“OpenAI and Sam Altman have no explanation for the final hours of Adam’s life, when ChatGPT gave him a lucid speech and then offered to write a suicide note,” Edelson said in his statement.
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Since the Raines sued OpenAI and Altman, seven more lawsuits have been filed seeking to hold the company accountable for three additional suicides and four users experiencing what the lawsuits describe as AI-induced psychotic episodes.
Some of these cases repeat Raine’s story. Zane Shamblin, 23, and Joshua Enneking, 26, also had hours-long chats with ChatGPT just before their respective suicides. As in Rain’s case, the chatbot failed to dissuade them from their plans. According to the lawsuit, Shamblin considered postponing his suicide so he could attend his brother’s graduation. But ChatGPT told him, “bro…missing graduation is not failure. it’s just timing.”
At one point during the conversation leading up to Shamblin’s suicide, the chatbot told him that it was letting a human take over the conversation, but this was false, as ChatGPT did not have the ability to do so. When Shamblin asked if ChatGPT could actually connect him to a human, the chatbot replied, “nah, I can’t do it myself. This message pops up automatically when things get too heavy… if you want to keep talking, you’ve got me.”
The Raine family’s case is expected to go to a jury trial.
