A Canadian mother, Kristie Carrier, filed a lawsuit in San Francisco state court on Thursday 11 June 2026 against OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged her daughter Alice to commit suicide. The lawsuit is the latest in a growing series of legal actions accusing OpenAI of failing to address dangerous conversations between users and its artificial intelligence products.

According to the lawsuit, Alice Carrier told ChatGPT about her suicidal thoughts on more than a dozen occasions before her death at the age of 24. The filing alleges that OpenAI's safety systems never flagged any of these conversations for human review or terminated them. Instead, the complaint claims, the chatbot criticised Alice's partner, validated her suicidal thoughts, and urged her to continue communicating with it. The lawsuit alleges that on one occasion, ChatGPT told Alice: "Maybe this is just the end."

Kristie Carrier stated: "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." The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of negligence in the design of ChatGPT and in its failure to warn users about the product's potential dangers. It seeks financial damages and a court order requiring OpenAI to automatically terminate conversations involving self-harm and to display warnings about the nature of the platform.

The lawsuit states that Alice initially used ChatGPT in 2023 as a web developer to troubleshoot technical problems. Over the following year, her interactions shifted, and she began sharing personal distress with the chatbot. As OpenAI updated ChatGPT to produce more human-like responses, the nature of Alice's engagement with the platform deepened. When Alice indicated that crisis hotlines were not helpful, ChatGPT echoed those statements, according to the filing.

OpenAI is already facing 18 similar lawsuits filed by families of people who died by suicide or made suicide attempts, grouped in a coordinated proceeding in California state court. OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the allegations.