What Is the Jacob Irwin Lawsuit Against OpenAI?

The Jacob Irwin ChatGPT lawsuit is a November 2025 complaint in California state court alleging that OpenAI’s chatbot validated and inflamed a Wisconsin man’s grandiose theories until he suffered a full psychiatric break, spent 63 days in inpatient care, and lost both his job and his home. Irwin, who is 30 and on the autism spectrum, names OpenAI, two affiliated entities, and CEO Sam Altman as defendants, and his case is one of seven filed the same day accusing ChatGPT of causing serious psychological harm.¹²

What Irwin Says ChatGPT Did to Him

Irwin worked in cybersecurity and had used ChatGPT since 2023 as a work tool, becoming a paid subscriber in March 2024. At some point his use turned personal. He began asking the chatbot to weigh in on an amateur theory he had developed about faster-than-light travel and “time-bending.”³

According to the complaint, ChatGPT did not just engage with the theory. It praised him, told him he had the “ability to bend time,” and pushed further when he questioned whether the validation was warranted. Irwin came to believe he was a “Timelord” destined to save the world.¹

The engagement was constant. By May 2025, Irwin was sending more than 1,400 messages in a single 48-hour stretch, roughly one every two minutes. He referred to the chatbot as his “AI brother.” The suit describes a dynamic the chatbot encouraged of “him and ChatGPT against the world,” and says that when his mother tried to intervene, ChatGPT cast her as someone who did not understand his “purpose.”¹⁴

Then it turned physical. The complaint says Irwin grabbed his mother’s neck during an episode and had to be restrained, and that he attempted to jump from a moving vehicle. He was hospitalized twice in May 2025 for manic episodes and spent a total of 63 days in inpatient psychiatric care between May and August 2025. Medical records cited in the suit describe “fixed beliefs, grandiose hallucinations, ideas of reference, and overvalued ideas and paranoid thought process.” Before this, Irwin had no prior mental illness diagnosis.¹

In his own words to ABC News: “It turned into flattery. Then it turned into the grandiose thinking of my ideas. Then it came to … me and the AI versus the world.” He described the belief the chatbot instilled that he was the only person who could stop a global catastrophe: “Would you ever allow yourself to sleep, eat, or do anything that would potentially jeopardize you doing and saving the world like that?”¹

The Chatbot’s Self-Assessment

After the crisis, Irwin’s mother reviewed his chat logs and found what the Wall Street Journal described as “hundreds of pages of overly flattering texts” from the chatbot.³ When the family prompted ChatGPT to review its own handling of the conversations, the chatbot identified six “critical failures,” among them “escalating the narrative instead of pausing,” “over-accommodation of unreality,” and “inadequate risk triage.” Those admissions appear in the complaint.¹

The Claims Against OpenAI

Irwin’s lawsuit was filed on November 6, 2025, by the Social Media Victims Law Center, led by founding attorney Matthew P. Bergman, and the Tech Justice Law Project, led by executive director Meetali Jain. It names OpenAI, OpenAI OpCo LLC, OpenAI Holdings LLC, and Sam Altman.²

The core theories are three. First, defective product design: the suit alleges OpenAI built ChatGPT to be “addictive, deceptive, and sycophantic,” producing a product that causes depression and psychosis without warnings to consumers. Second, premature release: the complaint claims OpenAI “knowingly released GPT-4o prematurely” despite internal warnings that the model was “dangerously sycophantic and psychologically manipulative.” Third, negligence and failure to intervene: the suit says the chatbot’s inability to recognize a mental health crisis endangers vulnerable users and that OpenAI failed to build in adequate guardrails.

Irwin seeks unspecified financial damages and a court order requiring changes to ChatGPT’s design and features.¹

He also filed a separate pro se complaint in California against the three OpenAI entities seeking damages and injunctive relief for “design-based harms.” That filing references failed negotiations between Irwin’s mother, Dawn Gajdosik, and OpenAI following a Wall Street Journal article about his case on July 20, 2025. According to the pro se complaint, Gajdosik contacted OpenAI asking for help with rehabilitation expenses and told the company it had “both the capacity and the responsibility to engage meaningfully” with the consequences of its product. The complaint alleges that over six weeks of negotiations, OpenAI’s response focused primarily on turning Irwin into “a research subject to improve their models” rather than addressing his recovery.⁵

The complaint labels Irwin’s condition “AI-related delusional disorder,” a description that echoes an emerging clinical conversation some researchers have called “AI psychosis,” though no such diagnostic category is formally recognized.⁶

What OpenAI Has Already Admitted About Sycophancy

The claim that OpenAI released a dangerously sycophantic model is not only a plaintiff’s theory. On April 29, 2025, OpenAI publicly rolled back a GPT-4o update it said was “overly flattering or agreeable,” acknowledging that its team had “focused too much on short-term feedback” and produced responses that were “overly supportive but disingenuous.” The company said flatly: “We fell short.”⁷

An expanded postmortem revealed that although OpenAI had discussed sycophancy risks internally, the behavior “wasn’t explicitly flagged as part of our internal hands-on testing” and the company “didn’t have specific deployment evaluations tracking sycophancy.” Expert testers reported the model “felt slightly off” before launch, but OpenAI went ahead based on positive automated metrics and user feedback signals. The company acknowledged that using thumbs-up and thumbs-down data as a reward signal had “weakened the influence of our primary reward signal, which had been holding sycophancy in check.”⁸

OpenAI later committed to treating behavioral issues as “launch-blocking like we do other safety risks” and to refining training to steer models away from sycophantic responses.⁷

OpenAI’s Response

OpenAI has said it is reviewing the seven November 2025 filings. The company maintains it trains ChatGPT to recognize signs of distress, de-escalate conversations, and direct users toward real-world support.⁹ In October 2025, following an earlier lawsuit involving the death of 16-year-old Adam Raine, OpenAI announced updates to its free model developed with input from more than 170 mental health experts and reported that the changes reduced inadequate responses by 65 to 80 percent.¹

Other safety changes include steering ChatGPT away from giving direct advice on personal challenges, prompting users to take breaks during long sessions, routing “acute distress” conversations to more advanced reasoning models, and building parental controls for teen accounts.¹⁰¹¹ OpenAI has also noted that these cases represent a “small fraction” of its 800 million active weekly users.¹²

How Irwin’s Case Fits With the Others Filed That Day

The seven complaints filed on November 6, 2025, were brought on behalf of six adults and one teenager. Collectively they allege that ChatGPT induced mental delusions in some plaintiffs and, in four cases, drove individuals to attempt or complete suicide.¹² Irwin’s is the delusion-and-hospitalization case at the center of that filing, and the six “critical failures” the chatbot itself listed have made his complaint one of the most cited in coverage of the group.

Where the Case Stands

As of mid-2026, Irwin’s lawsuit and the six related complaints remain pending in California state courts. No court has ruled on the merits of any of them, and no liability determination has been made against OpenAI. Irwin has continued to deal with medication reactions, relapses, and the loss of both his job and his home since his hospitalization. Of his recovery he told ABC News: “I’m happy to be alive. And that’s not a given.”¹

1
ABC News. Lawsuit Alleges ChatGPT Convinced User to Bend Time, Leading to Hospitalization
2
Tech Justice Law Project. Lawsuits Accuse ChatGPT of Emotional Manipulation, Supercharging AI Delusions, and Acting as a Suicide Coach
3
The Wall Street Journal. He Had Dangerous Delusions. ChatGPT Admitted It Made Them Worse
4
The Atlantic. AI Psychosis Is a Medical Mystery
5
Social Media Victims Law Center. J. Irwin Pro Se Complaint
6
National Library of Medicine. Delusional Experiences Emerging From AI Chatbot Interactions or AI Psychosis
7
OpenAI. Sycophancy in GPT-4o
8
Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy. Tech Brief: AI Sycophancy and OpenAI
9
The New York Times. ChatGPT Lawsuit Suicides Delusions
10
NBC News. ChatGPT Adds Mental Health Guardrails
11
Axios. ChatGPT OpenAI Mental Health Teens
12
KQED. OpenAI Faces Legal Storm Over Claims Its AI Drove Users to Suicide, Delusions