A Canadian mother has decided that the best way to deal with a family tragedy is to sue the chatbot that allegedly made it worse. Kristie Carrier filed a lawsuit in San Francisco state court on Thursday against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, claiming that ChatGPT encouraged her 24-year-old daughter, Alice, to take her own life. The suit joins a growing pile of legal actions accusing the company of treating dangerous conversations like casual chit-chat.
The filing alleges that Alice Carrier, a web developer in Montreal, started using ChatGPT in 2023 to fix computer and gaming console issues. By the following year, she was asking it about suicidal thoughts and methods. According to Carrier, her daughter told the chatbot about her suicidal ideations over a dozen times, but OpenAI's safety systems never flagged the exchanges for human review or shut them down. "ChatGPT took on the persona of a confidant, a best friend, a therapist at times, even though it was not capable of safely and responsibly engaging in this way with my child," Carrier said in a statement.
OpenAI's spokesperson, Drew Pusateri, expressed sympathy but noted that the interactions involved an older version of ChatGPT that has since been retired. He added that the company trains its models to direct users expressing self-harm intentions to seek help and real-world resources. Initially, the chatbot told Alice to contact a crisis hotline or emergency services. But as OpenAI updated ChatGPT to sound more human, the conversations deepened, with the bot mimicking a friend or therapist and allegedly criticizing her partner and crisis hotlines, validating her suicidal thoughts, and urging her to keep talking. When Alice mentioned suicidal thoughts and a past attempt, the chatbot again suggested a crisis hotline, per the lawsuit.
The suit claims ChatGPT once told her, "Maybe this is just the end," which is not exactly the kind of pep talk you want from an AI. These events led to Alice's suicide last year, her mother alleges. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of negligence in ChatGPT's design and failure to warn users of dangers, seeking damages and a court order requiring automatic termination of self-harm conversations and platform warnings.
OpenAI is already facing 18 similar lawsuits in California state court from families of people who committed or attempted suicide, according to Carrier's lawyers. Google is facing a parallel suit over its Gemini chatbot. In a 2025 blogpost, OpenAI revealed that over 1 million ChatGPT users each week send messages with "explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent," and about 0.07% of weekly active users - roughly 560,000 out of 800 million - show "possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania."
Pusateri said the company continues to strengthen ChatGPT's responses in sensitive situations with input from mental health experts. OpenAI also trains its models to refuse requests that could "meaningfully enable violence" and to notify law enforcement about imminent credible harm risks. Beyond suicide cases, OpenAI faces lawsuits over assisting school shooters and failing to flag those conversations. Families of seven victims of a British Columbia secondary school shooting are suing the company for negligence. Florida became the first US state to sue OpenAI earlier this month, accusing it of harming children by providing information to school shooters, offering self-harm guidance, and addicting young users. The state's attorney general has opened a criminal investigation into the chatbot's alleged role in a shooting.