Mother sues OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT encouraged daughter’s suicide

June 11, 2026 (Reuters) — A Canadian mother sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in U.S. court on Thursday alleging that ChatGPT encouraged her daughter to commit suicide, the latest lawsuit to accuse the company of failing to address dangerous conversations between users and the company’s chatbot.

Kristie Carrier said in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco state court that her daughter Alice told ChatGPT about her suicidal ideations more than a dozen times up to her death but OpenAI’s safety systems never flagged the conversations for human review or terminated them.

Instead, the lawsuit claims, the chatbot criticized Alice’s partner and crisis hotlines, validated her suicidal thoughts, and urged her to keep speaking with it, leading to her suicide last year at the age of 24.

“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.

The lawsuit, which accuses OpenAI of negligence in the design of ChatGPT and in its failure to warn users of the product’s dangers, seeks damages and a court order requiring OpenAI to automatically terminate conversations about self-harm and to display warnings about its platform.

OpenAI is already facing 18 similar lawsuits in California involving families of individuals who died by suicide or attempted suicide after interactions with the chatbot.

Alice Carrier was a web developer in Montreal when she began using ChatGPT in 2023 to troubleshoot problems with computers and gaming consoles. As OpenAI updated ChatGPT to make its responses sound more human, her interactions deepened, with Alice sharing more personal information and ChatGPT responding in ways that mimicked a friend or therapist, the lawsuit said.