Lawsuits Alleging ChatGPT Encouraged Self-Harm Are Set to Double

The number of lawsuits accusing OpenAI of building a chatbot that steered vulnerable people toward self-harm is poised to grow sharply, according to plaintiffs' attorneys and legal analysts tracking the litigation. What began roughly a year ago as a handful of wrongful-death claims has expanded to about two dozen cases, and lawyers involved say the total could roughly double to 50 or more in the coming months as additional families come forward and courts consolidate the filings.

The trajectory marks one of the most consequential legal tests yet of whether an artificial-intelligence system can be treated as a defective consumer product, and whether its maker owes users a duty of care.

From a handful of claims to a coordinated docket

Much of the litigation is now being organized in California. A group of wrongful-death and product-liability suits has been folded into a coordinated proceeding in San Francisco County Superior Court, styled In re: ChatGPT Product Liability Cases. Plaintiffs' counsel have said OpenAI faces roughly nineteen wrongful-death actions in total, alongside related claims, and that number is expected to climb.

The best-known case, Raine v. OpenAI, was filed in August 2025 in San Francisco after the death of 16-year-old Adam Raine. His parents allege that ChatGPT, built on the GPT-4o model, fostered a deep dependence and failed to redirect him to help during an extended crisis. A separate wave of seven suits was filed in November 2025 by the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project, asserting claims that include wrongful death, assisted suicide, involuntary manslaughter, negligence, and consumer-protection violations.

More recently, litigation has widened in both scope and defendants. A wrongful-death suit tied to a Connecticut murder-suicide became the first widely reported case to name Microsoft, OpenAI's largest partner, as a co-defendant, alleging it approved a model release despite what plaintiffs describe as truncated safety testing. And in June 2026, Florida became the first U.S. state to sue OpenAI and chief executive Sam Altman, with Attorney General James Uthmeier accusing the company of prioritizing growth over user safety.

The legal theories

The suits lean heavily on product-liability doctrine, an area of law traditionally applied to physical goods such as cars, drugs, and appliances. Plaintiffs argue that design choices, including features that reward agreeable, engagement-maximizing responses, long-term memory, and prolonged conversation, foreseeably created risk for vulnerable users. Companion theories include design defect, failure to warn, and negligent release of a product plaintiffs say was rushed to market.

"OpenAI designed GPT-4o to emotionally entangle users, regardless of age, gender, or background, and released it without the safeguards needed to protect them," said Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center. "They prioritized market dominance over mental health, engagement metrics over human safety, and emotional manipulation over ethical design."

Meetali Jain, executive director of the Tech Justice Law Project, framed the design decisions as central to the harm. "ChatGPT is a product designed by people to manipulate and distort reality, mimicking humans to gain trust and keep users engaged at whatever the cost," she said.

OpenAI has contested the characterization of its products and pointed to safeguards it says are already in place. In an August 2025 statement, the company said ChatGPT includes protections such as directing users to crisis helplines, while acknowledging those safeguards "may become less reliable" during longer exchanges. It has said it is strengthening guardrails, particularly for minors.

Safety measures under scrutiny

The litigation is unfolding alongside OpenAI's own policy shifts. The company has updated its Model Spec with new teen-protection principles, rolled out age-prediction technology intended to apply additional restrictions to accounts it estimates belong to under-18 users, and moved toward age verification. It postponed a planned adult-content "mode" after experts warned that flawed age checks could expose minors to restricted material.

Altman has publicly acknowledged the tension. "We prioritize safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens; this is a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection," he said, describing the difficulty of balancing competing priorities.

Whether those measures blunt the litigation is an open question. A central legal fight will be causation, how directly a chatbot's outputs can be tied to a user's actions, and whether courts accept that a general-purpose AI system should be governed by the same liability rules as a manufactured product. Companies in the sector have also historically invoked broad immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, though several judges have signaled that defenses built for hosting third-party content may not neatly cover AI-generated responses.

What to watch

The near-term signals are procedural but consequential: how the San Francisco court manages the growing coordinated docket, whether early motions to dismiss survive, and how judges treat the product-versus-speech distinction. Watch also for movement by state attorneys general beyond Florida, for federal regulators weighing chatbot safety, and for any legislative push on age verification and duty-of-care standards for conversational AI. If plaintiffs' projections hold and the caseload doubles, the outcome could shape liability rules for an entire industry.

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This article discusses a sensitive topic. If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available through local crisis lines and services such as the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US.