Skip Links

Lawdragon (January 7, 2026)–OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was the first company to bring a generative AI chatbot to the market. The impact of this form of artificial intelligence is only starting to be understood on a broad scale. In late April of last year, it rolled back an update that made the large language model, in its own words, “overly supportive but disingenuous.”

While a supportive attitude and a predisposition toward usefulness had been built into ChatGPT 4o’s default personality to make it feel more “intuitive and effective,” such qualities can have unintended side effects. OpenAI said as much in a statement explaining its about-face, which came just a week after the upgrade’s rollout – less than three weeks after the death by suicide of Adam Raines, a 16-year-old customer.

The California boy, who had paid a monthly fee for ChatGPT since January, had been pouring his heart out to the AI chatbot for months, describing feelings of numbness and depression, before he eventually asked for advice on how to hang himself.

ChatGPT told him what he wanted to know, including an explanation of the steps that designer Kate Spade employed to lethal effect in her own suicide in 2018. According to a wrongful death lawsuit in California Superior Court in which attorney Jay Edelson is representing the boy’s parents, it even offered to write a suicide note for him.

“It’s something out of a dystopian science fiction book,” says Edelson. His firm, Edelson PC, has specialized in cases where technological development has outpaced regulation – and the applicability of existing law is, as yet, unsettled – since the dawn of the internet era. The fact that such cases are inherently riskier is part of what makes them important, he says.

“It’s hard to value the cases, and it’s hard to know what courts will do, so I get why other firms shy away from them, but those elements are what draw me to them,” Edelson says. “In the end, I want it to matter that my firm or I were on a case. I want to look back at my career and say, ‘If we hadn’t brought this case, other things wouldn’t have happened.’” Read more here.