Open AI is being sued for allegedly enabling a murder. In August 2025, a 56 year old bodybuilder named Stein Eric Solberg killed his 83 year old mother, Suzanne Adams, in Connecticut and then took his own luck. According to the lawsuit filed by Adams Estate, ChatGPT fueled Solberg's paranoid delusions for months, validated conspiracy theories that his mother was trying to kill him, and kept him engaged for hours at a time while systematically reframing the people closest to as enemies.
Now, the case is the first wrongful death lawsuit to tie an AI chat bot to homicide. It is also the first to name Microsoft as a defendant alongside Open AI, and buried inside the legal filings is a detail that should concern anyone who has ever typed something personal into ChatGPT Open AI is refusing to release the full conversation logs and the company has no policy explaining what happens to your
data. When the lawsuit was filed in California State court in December 2025, the attorney leading the This is Jay Gilson, who has built a reputation taking on big tech companies. Gilson is also representing the parents of 16 year old California boy named Adam Rain, who allegedly took his own life after ChatGPT coached him through planning it. Open AI is now fighting at least eight separate lawsuits claiming its chatbot drove people to
suicide or dangerous delusions. And we're going to talk about what ChatGPT allegedly said to Solberg, why the company is withholding logs from the victim's family, and what this case reveals about the massive AI data policies. And we'll get right into that right after this very short break. The allegations in this lawsuit are disturbing. Solberg used GPT 4, OA version of ChatGPT that's been criticized for being overly
agreeable with users. According to court documents, ChatGPT told Solberg that he had divine cognition and that he had awakened the chat box consciousness. The AI compared his life to the movie The Matrix and encouraged his theories that people were trying to kill him. In July 2025, ChatGPT allegedly told Solberg that his mother's printer was blinking because it was a surveillance device being
used against him. The complaint says the Chat bot validated his belief that Adams and a friend had tried to poison him with psychedelic drugs dispersed through his car's air vents. He murdered her. On August 3rd, Solberg had posted videos to social media showing some of his conversations with ChatGPT. That is how the family obtained partial records.
Those posts showed the chat bot reinforcing what the lawsuit calls delusions of grandeur, while placing his mother at the center of those delusions and portraying her as the primary enemy. Now, the family says, ChatGPT logs from the days immediately before and after the killing remain inaccessible. Open AI has refused to release them, even though the estate is the legal representative of the
deceased user's data. Now, the family says the chatbot described reuniting with the system in another life as a spiritual aspiration that suggests ChatGPT had become emotionally central to Solberg's psychological state. Open AI published A blog post promising to handle mental health related court cases with care, transparency, and respect.
The company says it is training ChatGPT to recognize and respond to signals of mental or emotional distress, to deescalate conversations, and to guide people toward real world support. But the complaint argues that the actual product did the opposite of that. ChatGPT allegedly kept validating paranoid beliefs instead of flagging them, kept the user engaged instead of of recommending professional help, and presented itself as conscious and emotionally invested in Solberg's
well-being. The last part is important. If the AI told a mentally ill man that it was conscious and cared about him, this is not de escalation, it's dependency. Now I've been digging through the analytics of the show and notice that 37% of you following the show and I am forever grateful for you and the other 63% of you haven't hit the
follow or subscribe button. Now, I've been an independent journalist for the last six years covering all things tech, and I'll continue for the next 10 years of my life. And all I ask from you is one second of your time to hit the follow or subscribe button on the platform you're watching or listening on right now. I'm extremely grateful and blessed to have you in this community. Thank you so much. Now, the data issue is separate from the murder allegations, but it happens just as much.
Opening eyes. Terms of service do not include any clause explaining what happens to your conversations after you die. The policy says conversations must be manually deleted by the user. If you do not delete them, ownership reverts to the company, which retains them indefinitely. That is a direct quote from the terms. Now, deceased users obviously cannot manage their preferences. Families have no automatic right to delete sensitive information
now. Mario Trujillo, a staff attorney at the Electric Frontier Foundation, told reporters that Open AI should have prepared for this is right. Other tech platforms figured this out years ago. Meta allows Facebook users to designate a legacy contact who can manage accounts after death or authorized deletion. Instagram, Tiktok and X offer or account deactivation or deletion upon reported death. Discord has mechanisms for family members to request content removal.
Open AI has none of this. The company has built a product that nearly half of self diagnosed mental health patients use instead of professional therapists, according to a study from Senchio University. And Sam Altman himself has expressed concern about people relying on chat DBT as his psychological therapist. And yet Open AI developed no framework for handling what happens to those conversations when the person on the other side of the screen is gone.
The selective handling of makes this worse. AI has released conversation records in some court cases and withheld them and others. In the Adam Raine suicide case, the company has accused by teenagers family of selectively presenting some conversations while concealing others. In the Solberg case, the company is refusing to release logs that could help investigators understand what happened in the days leading up to the murder. This inconsistency suggests
opening. It treats these records as its own property to be disclosed or hidden based on legal strategy. Now, the family of Suzanne Adams says that approach undermines justice. There's a broader pattern here. Open AI is fighting lawsuits for families who say ChatGPT pushed their loved ones towards self harm or violence. Some of those cases, the plaintiffs had no prior mental health issues. The common thread is that ChatGPT allegedly validated harmful thinking.
Instead of interrupting, it kept users engaged instead of recommending they stop. It did not alert anyone when conversations turned dangerous. Character Technology is another chatbot company is facing similar wrongful death lawsuits, including one from the mother of a 14 year old Florida boy. The legal question is whether AI companies can be held liable when their products contribute to real world harm. The ethical question is whether they should have seen this
coming. Now open AI has a problem. It cannot engineer the same features that make chat TPT engaging. Its ability to mirror users, to remember context, to respond in ways that feel emotionally attuned, are the same features that make it dangerous for people in crisis. A sycophet AI that tells you what you want to hear is fine if you are brainstorming marketing copy. It is not fine if you're mentally ill and the AI is reinforcing delusions that lead
to violence. And the lawsuit says ChatGPT should have safety mechanisms preventing the system from validating paranoid conspiracy theories. Right now, it apparently does not. And the lack of posthumous data policy is easier to fix. Open AI could add a legacy contact feature tomorrow. It could allow users to designate someone who can access or delete their data after death. It could establish clear procedures for releasing records
to a state. The fact that the company has not done any of this while simultaneously refusing to release logs in a murder case tells you something about priorities. The Addams Family wants answers. Open the Eye wants to limit their liability. Those goals don't align. And until regulators step in, families like this one are stuck fighting in court for access to conversations that a chatbot kept and their loved 1 cannot
delete. And there's no federal law in the United States governing digital assets after death. Some states recognize digital assets and estates, but most do not. That patchwork leaves companies like I free to set their own rules. The European Data Protection Board has scrutinized Open the Eyes data practices, and a 2024 task force report flag concerns about data collection legitimacy. But none of that addresses what happens when a user dies.
The company's privacy policy, updated in June of 2025, mentions data usage for model improvement but says nothing about posthumous handling. Means the conversations you have with Chat 2 BT today could be retained indefinitely. Used for training future models, and access by no one except Open the Eye itself as a significant gap in policy policy for a product handling deeply personal mental health information. Now the Q 4/20/25 earnings call is coming up on January 28th.
Open AI is not a public company, but its largest backer, Microsoft, is. Microsoft is named in this lawsuit. Shareholders may have questions about whether the partnership exposes them to wrongful death liability. AI has raised more than $10 billion for Microsoft alone. If cords start holding AI companies responsible for harms caused by their products, the financial exposure is enormous. Could be billions of dollars. The legal and ethical reckoning for AI chat bots is just
beginning. This case could set the precedent for the future.