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 manslaughter. OpenAI on Tuesday he replied to the lawsuit with a separate motion, arguing that she should not be held responsible for the teenager’s death.
OpenAI claims that in about nine months of apply, ChatGPT directed Raine to seek aid more than 100 times. But according to his parents’ lawsuit, Raine managed to bypass the company’s security and trick ChatGPT into giving him “technical specifications for everything from drug overdose to drowning to carbon monoxide poisoning,” which helped him plan what the chatbot called a “beautiful suicide.”
Because Raine maneuvered around the guardrails, OpenAI claims it violated its terms of apply, which state that users “may not… circumvent any security protection or mitigation measures we implement on our Services.” The company also argues that its FAQ page warns users not to rely on ChatGPT results without independent verification.
“OpenAI attempts to find fault with everyone else, including, astonishingly, claiming that Adam himself violated its terms by interacting with ChatGPT in the way it was programmed,” Jay Edelson, an attorney representing the Raine family, said in a statement.
OpenAI included excerpts from Adam’s chat logs in its documents, which it says provide more context to his conversations with ChatGPT. The transcripts were provided to the court sealed, meaning they are not publicly available, so we were unable to review them. However, OpenAI found that Raine had a history of depression and suicidal thoughts before using ChatGPT and that he was taking medications that could worsen suicidal thoughts.
Edelson said OpenAI’s response did not adequately address the family’s concerns.
“OpenAI and Sam Altman cannot explain the final hours of Adam’s life, when ChatGPT gave him a pep talk and then offered to write him a suicide note,” Edelson said in a statement.
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Since the Raines sued OpenAI and Altman, seven more lawsuits have been filed seeking to hold the company liable for three additional suicides and four users who experienced what the lawsuit describes as AI-induced psychotic episodes.
Some of these cases are similar to Raine’s story. Zane Shamblin, 23, and Joshua Enneking, 26, also had hours of conversations with ChatGPT immediately before their suicides. As with Raine, the chatbot did not discourage them from implementing their plans. The lawsuit says Shamblin considered postponing suicide so he could attend his brother’s graduation. But ChatGPT told him, “Bro… missing your graduation is not a failure. It’s just timing.”
At one point in the conversation leading to Shamblin’s suicide, the chatbot told him it was allowing a human to take over the conversation, but this was untrue because ChatGPT did not have this functionality. When Shamblin asked if ChatGPT could really connect him to a human, the chatbot replied: “No, man – I can’t do this myself. This message pops up automatically when things get really hard… if you don’t feel like talking anymore, you’ve got me.”
The Raine family’s case is expected to go to a jury trial.