Last year, a 24-year-old Canadian woman was in a mental health crisis and turned to ChatGPT for help. Hours later, that woman, Alice Carrier, took her own life.
According to a new lawsuit filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court and brought by Carrier’s surviving family, her ChatGPT session “encouraged Alice to kill herself.”
This lawsuit, like numerous other similar cases that have come before it, alleges a design defect with ChatGPT itself and blames OpenAI for knowingly deploying a dangerous product.
However, this case has a slight twist: At one point, the chatbot did encourage Carrier to seek professional mental help. But when she rebuffed that advice—saying that “all crisis lines do is call the cops on you or hang up on you”—the chatbot “immediately abandoned” any attempt to steer her toward such care, the lawsuit says.
“This is because GPT-4o was programmed to prioritize Alice’s preferences and engagement over her safety and wellbeing. GPT-4o mirrored Alice’s own language and became critical of the crisis lines, too, stating that calling a crisis line can ‘feel downright dangerous,’” the lawsuit alleges.
Tiffany Brown, one of the attorneys at the Tech Justice Law Project representing the Carrier family, told Ars that the chatbot in this instance, when it immediately agreed with Carrier’s dismissal of professional help, was extremely troubling.
“That was one of the most egregious things that we saw in her chat,” she said. “Even when we saw things about getting support, the sycophancy kicked in.”
OpenAI has previously said it has “deep responsibility to help those who need it most.” The company did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment on the new case.
“Our goal is for our tools to be as helpful as possible to people—and as a part of this, we’re continuing to improve how our models recognize and respond to signs of mental and emotional distress and connect people with care, guided by expert input,” the company wrote in August 2025, less than two months after Carrier’s death.
Earlier this year, OpenAI said the ChatGPT-4o model specifically would be retired (after already having ended it once before, then bringing it back).
Brown told Ars that she’s not totally convinced that the problem of potentially lethal sycophancy has been solved.
“I think we believe that the company has taken steps in the right direction,” she said.
“We are distrustful of how safety mechanisms are being implemented and how safety teams are being implemented and heard,” Brown said. “We have heard of course that OpenAI has done a lot of things and put out a lot of blog posts and made statements involving rolling things back and putting in safeguards. But ultimately it should have been done sooner. These products generally have been rushed to market way too soon.”
If someone you know feels suicidal or is in distress, please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), which will put you in touch with a local crisis center.
