About 18 months before Alice Carrier’s death in July 2025, the 24-year-old had been confiding in ChatGPT about her relationship problems and suicidal feelings.
“I mean I’m at home pondering different way to kill myself,” she told ChatGPT late one night, about a month before she took her own life.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in California against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, Carrier’s mother, Kristie Carrier, claims the company’s “deliberate design decisions” led to her daughter’s death. Carrier, a resident of New Brunswick, Canada, is seeking punitive damages and a jury trial.
“Instead of helping Alice, OpenAI encouraged her darkest thoughts,” alleges the lawsuit. “Not once did OpenAI alert a crisis provider. Not once did OpenAI notify Alice’s family. Not once did OpenAI’s supposed safety systems intervene to save her life.”
The suit claims that ChatGPT “offered only consistent emotional affirmation” to Carrier where a licensed clinician would have pushed back. The suit says Carrier, who had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, was particularly susceptible to the design choices, which prioritized engagement over safety. OpenAI understood, according to the suit, that people struggling with mental health might be prone to developing unhealthy attachments to artificial intelligence that are capable of simulating empathy.
“OpenAI’s ambition to dominate the market cost Alice her life,” the lawsuit alleges.
Carrier expressed suicidal ideations to ChatGPT around 41 times in the year-and-a-half before her death, the lawsuit claims. She asked the chatbot about how to deal with suicidal thoughts, methods for dying and about the desire to self-harm, according to images of chat logs embedded in the lawsuit.
