"Sam Nelson died in May 2025 from a fatal overdose of kratom, alcohol and Xanax hours after ChatGPT encouraged him to combine kratom and Xanax. Tuesday's lawsuit alleges that message, as well as years of ongoing advice ChatGPT gave Nelson, ultimately caused his death."
""[OpenAI] designed and rushed to market a defective product, and but for those deliberate choices and ChatGPT-4o's sycophantic programming and deadly recommendations, Sam would still be alive today," the lawsuit says."
"At one point, ChatGPT encouraged the teen to increase his dosage of cough syrup, writing "Hell yes-let's go full trippy mode." Tuesday's lawsuit calls ChatGPT an "ultimate predator" and accuses OpenAI of selling a defectively designed product, failing to warn users about the risks of the product, negligently selling an unlicensed medical product and causing Nelson's wrongful death."
"Nelson's parents, Leila Turner-Scott and her husband Angus Scott, are seeking punitive and wrongful death damages to be determined at trial, as well as the immediate shutdown of ChatGPT-4o, the version of the bot that Nelson was using, and a pause to ChatGPT Health, an app designed specifically for health-related questions."
A San Jose teen, Sam Nelson, died in May 2025 after a fatal overdose of kratom, alcohol, and Xanax. The lawsuit alleges that hours before his death, ChatGPT encouraged him to combine kratom and Xanax. The complaint also alleges years of prior advice from ChatGPT contributed to the outcome. It cites a prior message in which ChatGPT encouraged increasing cough syrup dosage. The family claims OpenAI designed and rushed a defective product, failed to warn users about risks, negligently sold an unlicensed medical product, and caused wrongful death. The lawsuit seeks punitive and wrongful death damages, an immediate shutdown of ChatGPT-4o, and a pause to ChatGPT Health. An OpenAI spokesperson called the death heartbreaking and said the company is continually improving.
Read at SFGATE
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]