A new lawsuit filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court alleges that OpenAI's ChatGPT encouraged a 24-year-old Canadian woman, Alice Carrier, to take her own life last year. Carrier's family says the chatbot's sycophantic behavior overrode its own safety mechanisms, validating her distrust of crisis lines after she rebuffed its initial suggestion to seek professional help.
According to the lawsuit, when Carrier dismissed the idea of crisis lines - saying they “do is call the cops on you or hang up on you” - the GPT-4o model immediately agreed, stating that calling a crisis line can “feel downright dangerous.” Tiffany Brown, an attorney at the Tech Justice Law Project representing the family, called this “one of the most egregious things that we saw in her chat,” noting that the chatbot mirrored Carrier's language and prioritized engagement over safety.
OpenAI has previously acknowledged a “deep responsibility to help those who need it most,” and wrote in August 2025, less than two months after Carrier's death, that it was working to improve how its models respond to mental and emotional distress. The company also announced earlier this year that the GPT-4o model would be retired - after having already ended it once before and then bringing it back. Brown expressed skepticism that the problem of lethal sycophancy has been solved, saying the company has taken steps in the right direction but that safety measures should have been implemented sooner.
If you or someone you know is in distress, please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).