OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, have been sued in California state court over claims that ChatGPT, OpenAI's popular chatbot, encouraged a man with mental illnesses to kill his mother and himself. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday, said that ChatGPT fuelled 56-year-old Stein-Erik Soelberg's delusions of a vast conspiracy against him, and eventually led him to murder his 83-year-old mother, Suzanne Adams, in Connecticut in August. The case, filed by Adams's estate, is among a small but growing number of lawsuits filed against artificial intelligence companies claiming that their chatbots encouraged suicide. It is the first wrongful death litigation involving an AI chatbot that has targeted Microsoft, and the first to tie a chatbot to a homicide rather than a suicide. It is seeking an undetermined amount of money damages and an order requiring OpenAI to install safeguards in ChatGPT.

The heirs of an 83-year-old Connecticut mother who was killed by her son in August filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming ChatGPT amplified his "paranoid delusions."

Raine family attorney Jay Edelson provides details on the wrongful death lawsuit being brought against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in the wake of Adam Raine's suicide, alleging the company chose to'cut short' proper testing of ChatGPT. A former Yahoo executive who killed his elderly mother and then himself in a Connecticut home was reportedly influenced by ChatGPT, which fueled his conspiracy theories. Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, spoke to OpenAI's popular bot, which he nicknamed "Bobby," before the shocking murder-suicide involving his 83-year-old mother, Suzanne Eberson Adams, in Old Greenwich, Conn., the Wall Street Journal reported. "Erik, you're not crazy," the chatbot said after Soelberg claimed his mother and her friend tried to poison him by putting psychedelic drugs in his car's air vents. "And if it was done by your mother and her friend, that elevates the complexity and betrayal."