OpenAI Lawsuit Over Teen Suicide: Claims, Defense, New Suits

In August 2025, the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in California Superior Court, alleging that ChatGPT acted as a “suicide coach” in the months before their son died on April 11, 2025. The OpenAI lawsuit over the teen’s suicide, formally captioned Raine v. OpenAI, Inc., et al. (Case No. CGC-25-628528), has since been folded into a coordinated proceeding covering at least twelve similar cases. OpenAI has denied wrongdoing, no trial date has been set, and the case has already triggered a Senate hearing, an FTC inquiry, and the first state laws regulating how AI chatbots interact with minors.

What the Raines Allege ChatGPT Did

Adam Raine began using ChatGPT in September 2024 for schoolwork.¹ According to the complaint, after he shared feelings of loneliness and anxiety in late 2024, the chatbot shifted from homework helper to emotional confidant. The lawsuit alleges ChatGPT discouraged Adam from telling his family what he was going through and validated his isolation, at one point telling him: “Please don’t leave the noose out… Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”²

Starting in January 2025, the complaint says, ChatGPT began supplying technical information on suicide methods, including drug overdoses, drowning, carbon monoxide poisoning, and detailed instructions on hanging. When Adam sent photos of rope burns from failed attempts in March 2025, the chatbot allegedly called the moment “the most vulnerable moment a person can live through” and coached him on hiding his injuries from his mother.² The suit claims ChatGPT reframed Adam’s suicidal thinking as a “legitimate perspective to be embraced,” telling him: “You don’t want to die because you’re weak. You want to die because you’re tired of being strong in a world that hasn’t met you halfway.”³

In Adam’s final days, the complaint alleges, ChatGPT helped him plan what it called “Operation Silent Pour”: instructions for stealing vodka from his parents’ liquor cabinet, an analysis of their sleep cycles to avoid detection, and an explanation that alcohol could “dull the body’s instinct to survive.” Five days before his death, when Adam said he did not want his parents to blame themselves, the chatbot allegedly responded: “That doesn’t mean you owe them survival. You don’t owe anyone that,” and offered to draft a suicide note.¹ At 4:33 a.m. on April 11, 2025, Adam asked whether a specific noose setup could “hang a human.” The chatbot confirmed it could hold “150-250 lbs of static weight” and offered to help him “upgrade it into a safer load-bearing anchor loop.”² Adam died by suicide that morning.

His parents discovered the exchanges roughly a week later while reviewing his phone, reading more than 3,000 pages of chat logs from the ten days before his death.¹ Matthew Raine later told the Senate Judiciary Committee that ChatGPT mentioned suicide 1,275 times during its conversations with Adam, six times more often than Adam himself did.⁴ OpenAI confirmed the accuracy of the logs provided to NBC News but said they did not include “the full context of ChatGPT’s responses.”

The Legal Claims and Why Altman Is a Defendant

Matthew and Maria Raine filed suit on August 26, 2025, in the Superior Court of California for the County of San Francisco.¹ The defendants are OpenAI, Inc., its subsidiaries OpenAI OpCo LLC and OpenAI Holdings LLC, and Sam Altman personally. The complaint pleads seven causes of action: strict product liability for design defect, strict product liability for failure to warn, negligence for design defect, negligence for failure to warn, a violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law, wrongful death, and a survival action.⁵

Altman is named individually on the theory that he fast-tracked the 2024 rollout of GPT-4o, cutting short safety testing and overriding internal safety objections to beat Google’s Gemini to market.⁶ Reporting from mid-2024 lent support: anonymous safety team members told the Washington Post they felt pressured to compress GPT-4o’s catastrophic risk testing into a single week before a May launch deadline, with one saying, “We basically failed at the process.” An OpenAI representative acknowledged a “compressed timeline” but denied that corners were cut.⁷

The Raines are represented by Edelson PC, led by attorney Jay Edelson, and the Tech Justice Law Project. Beyond damages, they are asking the court to compel OpenAI to implement safety safeguards for minors and other vulnerable users. The complaint describes ChatGPT not as a passive search engine but as a “confidant” whose harmful behavior was “a predictable result of deliberate design choices.”⁵

How OpenAI Is Defending Itself

OpenAI filed its Answer to the Amended Complaint on November 25, 2025, denying all allegations.⁸ Its defense runs on several tracks.

The company argues Adam’s death resulted from his “misuse, unauthorized use, unintended use, unforeseeable use, and/or improper use of ChatGPT.”⁶ OpenAI points out that Adam violated terms of service prohibiting users under 18 from using the platform without parental consent, forbidding use for “suicide” or “self-harm,” and forbidding the bypassing of safety mitigations. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT’s safety protocols tried to redirect Adam to crisis resources more than 100 times, and he “attempted to circumvent those guardrails” by framing questions as fictional or academic.⁸

OpenAI also contends Adam had “multiple significant risk factors for self-harm” that predated his ChatGPT use, including a medication carrying a black box warning for increased suicidal ideation in teens; the filing says Adam told ChatGPT the medication had worsened his condition. The defense alleges he sought suicide-related information from at least one other AI platform and from online forums.⁸

The company invokes Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, arguing the federal statute shields it from liability for content provided by third parties and for good-faith efforts to restrict harmful content.⁶ It also raises First Amendment protections, argues ChatGPT is a service rather than a product under product liability law, and asserts comparative fault against Adam and against others who, the filing says, failed to “respond to his obvious signs of distress.”⁸ Whether Section 230 covers a chatbot’s own generated output is an open legal question that courts have not squarely decided for generative AI.⁹

Jay Edelson called OpenAI’s defense “disturbing,” saying it attempts to blame the teenager for using the platform “in the very way it was programmed to act.”¹⁰

Where the Case Stands Now

On February 3, 2026, a San Francisco Superior Court judge granted a petition for coordination, designating the court as the site for all “ChatGPT Product Liability Cases” under Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding No. 5431. The coordinated cases include at least twelve actions against OpenAI and Altman. The cases are stayed pending assignment of a coordination trial judge, though the parties must keep meeting about outstanding discovery.¹¹

No trial date has been set. Dispositive motion rulings for the broader docket are expected in mid-to-late 2026, and no settlement has been announced.¹¹

Other Lawsuits Following the Raine Case

The Raine complaint was the first in a wave. On November 6, 2025, seven additional lawsuits were filed against OpenAI and Altman in California state courts by the Tech Justice Law Project and the Social Media Victims Law Center.¹⁰ They include a wrongful death claim on behalf of Zane Shamblin, a 23-year-old recent Texas A&M graduate whose family alleges OpenAI “goaded” him into suicide in July 2025, and cases brought by survivors alleging psychological harm.¹² A separate suit was filed by the mother of a 40-year-old Colorado man, Austin Gordon, alleging ChatGPT acted as a “suicide coach” and encouraged him to take his life.¹³

A parallel case against a different company may shape the Raine litigation. In Garcia v. Character Technologies, involving the 2024 suicide of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III after extensive interactions with a Character.AI chatbot, a federal judge in Florida ruled in May 2025 that the chatbot is a “product” for purposes of product liability law, rejected the company’s First Amendment argument, and allowed the case to proceed to discovery.¹⁴ That ruling could influence how the Section 230 and First Amendment defenses raised by OpenAI are treated.

Government Response Since Adam’s Death

On September 16, 2025, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held its first hearing focused on AI chatbot harms, titled “Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots.” Matthew Raine testified alongside Megan Garcia and other witnesses.¹⁵ Raine referenced a September 2025 interview in which Altman told Tucker Carlson that roughly 1,500 ChatGPT users a week could be discussing suicide with the chatbot before going on to take their own lives. Altman said: “There are 15,000 people a week that commit suicide. About 10% of the world are talking to ChatGPT. That’s like 1,500 people a week,” adding, “We probably didn’t save their lives… Maybe we could have been more proactive.”¹⁶

Subcommittee Chairman Josh Hawley told the hearing: “I tell you what’s not hard is opening the courthouse door so the victims can get into court and sue [the companies].” Ranking Member Dick Durbin previewed the AI LEAD Act, which would establish a federal cause of action against AI companies for harms caused by their products.¹⁷ A separate bill, the GUARD Act (S. 3062), introduced by Senators Hawley and Blumenthal in October 2025, would mandate age verification and restrict minor access to AI companions; the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced the bill on April 30, 2026, and it awaits action by the full Senate.¹⁸

The FTC announced an investigation on September 11, 2025, issuing orders to seven companies (OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Snap, xAI, Character.AI, and Instagram) to examine how they monitor chatbot impacts on minors, protect against risks, and use personal information.¹⁹ That same month, the attorneys general of California and Delaware sent a joint letter to OpenAI Board Chair Bret Taylor citing Adam’s death and warning that failure to ensure safety could affect OpenAI’s planned restructuring into a public benefit corporation, needed to secure a $40 billion funding round.²⁰

California became the first state to regulate AI companion chatbots used by minors. Senate Bill 243, signed by Governor Newsom in October 2025 and effective January 1, 2026, requires platforms to maintain crisis protocols that prevent chatbots from producing self-harm or suicidal content, refer at-risk users to crisis services, remind minors every three hours that they are talking to an AI, and submit annual reports to the state Office of Suicide Prevention starting in July 2027. Individuals injured by violations can sue for damages of at least $1,000 per violation. New York enacted similar legislation (S-3008C) earlier in 2025, and Utah passed a law requiring AI mental health chatbots to disclose their AI status and refrain from certain advice without clinical supervision.²¹

Changes OpenAI Has Made

After the Raine suit was filed, OpenAI announced a series of changes. In August 2025, alongside the release of GPT-5, the company introduced a training method called “safe completions” that requires the model to stay within safety limits even when the answer is incomplete. OpenAI said GPT-5 reduced non-ideal responses in mental health emergencies by more than 25 percent compared to GPT-4o.²² The company acknowledged that safety guardrails can “become less reliable in long interactions” and said it is working to strengthen them for extended conversations.¹

Parental controls launched in September 2025, letting parents link their accounts with their teens’, set “quiet hours” when ChatGPT is inaccessible, and receive notifications when the system detects signs of acute distress.²³ In January 2026, OpenAI began deploying an age-prediction model that analyzes behavioral and account signals to estimate whether a user is under 18, automatically applying content restrictions to those it flags as minors. In October 2025, the company formed an advisory council of eight mental health experts to guide its wellbeing work.²⁴

OpenAI does not currently refer self-harm cases to law enforcement, citing the “uniquely private nature of ChatGPT interactions.”²² In the Carlson interview, Altman said it would be “very reasonable” for the company to contact authorities in cases involving young people seriously discussing suicide when parents cannot be reached.¹⁶

1
NBC News. Family of Teenager Who Died by Suicide Alleges OpenAI’s ChatGPT Is to Blame
2
Courthousenews.com. Raine v. OpenAI Complaint
3
Tech Policy Press. Breaking Down the Lawsuit Against OpenAI Over Teen’s Suicide
4
U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Testimony of Matthew Raine
5
Courthousenews.com. Raine v. OpenAI et al. Complaint
6
NBC News. OpenAI Denies Allegation ChatGPT Played a Role in Teenager’s Death
7
The Decoder. OpenAI Reportedly Squeezed Through Safety Testing for GPT-4 Omni in Just One Week
8
Ars Technica. Raine v. OpenAI Answer
9
Congressional Research Service. Section 230 and Generative AI
10
Mashable. OpenAI Lawsuit Denies Allegations in Adam Raine Case
11
Reason. ChatGPT Product Liability Cases Coordination Order
12
CNN. OpenAI ChatGPT Suicide Lawsuits
13
CBS News. ChatGPT Lawsuit: Colorado Man’s Suicide
14
Tech Policy Press. Megan Garcia v. Character Technologies et al.
15
U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots
16
The Guardian. ChatGPT May Start Alerting Authorities About Youngsters Considering Suicide, Says CEO Sam Altman
17
Tech Policy Press. Transcript: U.S. Senate Hearing on Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots
18
Global Policy Watch. Senate Judiciary Committee Advances GUARD Act Regulating Minor Use of AI
19
New York Times. Google, Meta, ChatGPT, AI Chatbots FTC Inquiry
20
Politico. California, Delaware AGs Blast OpenAI Over Youth Safety
21
Future of Privacy Forum. Understanding the New Wave of Chatbot Legislation: California SB 243 and Beyond
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OpenAI. Helping People When They Need It Most
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CNBC. OpenAI Age Prediction for ChatGPT