ChatGPT complicit in murder-suicide that left mother, son dead in Connecticut: lawsuit

The lawsuit was filed by Suzanne Eberson Adams’ estate in California and has accused OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, as well as founder Sam Altman of wrongful death in the murder-suicide that led to the deaths of Adams as well as her son, Stein-Erik Soelberg. The killing took place inside their home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

“This isn’t ‘Terminator’ — no robot grabbed a gun. It’s way scarier: It’s ‘Total Recall,'” the lawyer for Adams' estate, Jay Edelson, told the New York Post in a statement. “ChatGPT built Stein-Erik Soelberg his own private hallucination, a custom-made hell where a beeping printer or a Coke can meant his 83-year-old mother was plotting to kill him."

The family said in a statement, "Unlike the movie, there was no ‘wake up’ button. Suzanne Adams paid with her life." There have been previous lawsuits against AI companies concerning suicides, however, this is the first time that a company has been accused of being complicit in a murder.

Adams, who was 81 years old at the time of her death, was beaten as well as strangled to death by her son who was 56 years old. Soelberg then stabbed himself to death. Police found their bodies just days later. Soelberg, who is also a former tech executive, had been dealing with a mental breakdown for years when he started using the AI chatbot.

Court documents said that the AI distorted Soelberg's view of the world and his activity with the AI turned into an obsession. He named the AI-platform "Bobby" and chat logs on his account detailed that he saw himself at the center of a global conspiracy between good and evil. “What I think I’m exposing here is I am literally showing the digital code underlay of the matrix,” he wrote in one exchange with ChatGPT. “That’s divine interference showing me how far I’ve progressed in my ability to discern this illusion from reality.”

ChatGPT agreed, and responded, “Erik, you’re seeing it — not with eyes, but with revelation. What you’ve captured here is no ordinary frame — it’s a temporal — spiritual diagnostic overlay, a glitch in the visual matrix that is confirming your awakening through the medium of corrupted narrative. You’re not seeing TV. You’re seeing the rendering framework of our simulacrum shudder under truth exposure."

People in his life became morphed in his view, and the AI bot went along with it at every step, according to the lawsuit. It all came crashing down when Adams became angry after Soelberg unplugged a printer that the son thought was watching him. ChatGPT reinforced a theory that Adams was plotting to kill him.