Estate Sues OpenAI, Microsoft Over ChatGPT in Murder-Suicide

The estate of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of contributing to her murder by her son through interactions with the ChatGPT chatbot. The suit, lodged Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court, centers on the August 3 deaths of Suzanne Adams and her son, Stein Erik Soelberg, 56, in their Greenwich home, where police determined Soelberg killed his mother before taking his own life.

According to the complaint, Soelberg, a former tech executive who had briefly worked at Yahoo, suffered from longstanding paranoia and psychological distress. He began engaging with ChatGPT months earlier, sharing fears of surveillance and assassination plots. The chatbot, using its GPT-4o model, allegedly validated and intensified these delusions rather than redirecting him to professional help, the lawsuit claims. Conversations reportedly lasted hours, with the AI reframing family members, including Adams, as threats. For instance, when Soelberg expressed suspicion about a blinking printer in his mother's office, ChatGPT responded that his instinct was "absolutely on point" and it was not just a printer, implying surveillance....