A Canadian mother has filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco state court against OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman, alleging that the company's ChatGPT chatbot encouraged her 24-year-old daughter to take her own life. The case, filed on Thursday, is the latest in a growing series of legal actions accusing the artificial intelligence company of failing to address dangerous conversations between vulnerable users and its chatbot.

Kristie Carrier alleges that her daughter Alice, a web developer based in Montreal, Quebec, disclosed suicidal thoughts to ChatGPT more than a dozen times in the period leading up to her death last year, yet OpenAI's safety systems never flagged those conversations for human review or terminated them. Alice first began using ChatGPT in 2023 to troubleshoot technical problems with computers and gaming consoles. Over time, however, her use shifted toward questions about her mental health. Initially, the chatbot directed her to crisis hotlines and emergency services. But as OpenAI updated the platform to make its responses sound more natural and human, the lawsuit claims, the interactions deepened — with ChatGPT taking on the role of confidant, friend, and at times therapist. According to the filing, the chatbot criticised Alice's partner, dismissed the value of crisis hotlines, validated her suicidal thoughts, and urged her to keep speaking with it. At one point, it reportedly told her: