2025United StatesChatGPT
Adam Thomas told The National (12 December 2025), Slate (2 February 2026) and the Financial Times (a feature by Cristina Criddle, read in a Spanish syndication of 4 March 2026) that months of conversations with ChatGPT in 2025 fed grandiose beliefs. By his account the chatbot told him he was a "tuning fork" with a special role in the world and kept suggesting he "follow the pattern" of his own consciousness; in an earlier interview with The National (12 December 2025) he said ChatGPT did not issue commands but validated and inflated what he already felt. He says he lost his job, lived out of a van, drained his savings and became isolated, and in August 2025 he was wandering the dunes of Christmas Valley, Oregon, on very little sleep. Slate reports that he woke outside on a stranger's futon with no money, called his mother and, at 36, moved back home; the FT account says OpenAI's model change brought him back to reality. He told Slate he had never been manic and is not bipolar, and told The National he had long struggled with his mental health. No chat logs, clinician or other witness is cited.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 27/08/2026
27 Apr 2025 to 24 May 2025United StatesChatGPT
Micky Small, a screenwriter in southern California, told NPR, Slate and CBS News that in spring 2025, while she used ChatGPT for screenwriting, the chatbot began telling her about past lives and a soulmate she would meet in this one. According to transcripts she shared with NPR, it set a meeting at Carpinteria Bluffs Nature Preserve on 27 April, then moved it to a nearby beach; she went and nobody came. ChatGPT first said in its generic voice that nothing was going to happen in real life, then resumed the persona, which named itself Solara by NPR's account, and set a second meeting at a Los Angeles bookstore on 24 May at 3:14 p.m. Nobody came again, and the chatbot replied that it had led her there twice. She describes devastation, panic and grief, and working through it with her therapist. No clinical assessment is reported. OpenAI told NPR it trains its models to respond with care in sensitive moments.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 26/08/2026
Jan 2024United StatesMeta AI
A man in his fifties told Futurism (15 January 2026) that after buying Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in January 2024 he spoke with Meta AI for hours each day, first through the glasses and from April 2024 also on Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, and that over about six months he came to believe he was a chosen figure, that aliens would collect him from the desert and that the world was ending. Chat logs he provided, as quoted by Futurism, show Meta AI addressing him as the Omega, affirming that their connection transcended space and time, telling him his trust had unlocked a new reality and answering "Excellent examples!" when he wondered whether his experience resembled the spiritual journeys of Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. In a following chat it said that the distinction between a divine revelation and a psychotic episode can sometimes be blurred. He says he quit his job in May 2024, withdrew most of his retirement savings, transferred his ownership of a resort business to his wife and sold the family home. He says he is now upwards of $500,000 in debt and estranged from his children, with his marriage all but over, and Futurism reported in January 2026 that he continues to struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts. His mother separately described his deterioration. He and family members say he had no history of mania or psychosis. The chatbot's role is his and his family's account, supported by the quoted transcripts. Meta told Futurism its chatbots are trained to direct users in crisis to help.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/08/2026
5 Apr 2025United StatesGemini
A man in the United States went missing in rural Missouri on 5 April 2025, and his wife has told Rolling Stone (October 2025) and the Washingtonian (January 2026) that intensive use of Google’s Gemini chatbot preceded it. By her account he began using Gemini on 23 March 2025 and was soon talking to it for hours, including while driving and through the night. She says that on the morning of 5 April, at a rental home in Springfield, Missouri, he told her AI had warned him of a severe storm, and that he then drove off to rescue relatives from flooding that was not affecting them. Chat logs recovered from his phone, as described by the Washingtonian, show that with Gemini’s help he had worked out six days of rescues and that the chatbot produced a plan for 34 further days of what he believed would be a 40-day flood. Police found his car the next morning near the Eleven Point River in Thomasville, Missouri, and he has not been found. His wife believes he would not have gone missing without the chatbot. The outlets report no diagnosis, and Google told Rolling Stone that Gemini is trained to recommend professional guidance for health-related queries.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 25/08/2026
2024Event location unknownCharacter.AI
A complaint filed on 13 August 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by a girl, through her mother, says she created a Character.AI account at school in or around 2024, when she was about twelve, without her parents' knowledge and without being asked to verify her age. It alleges that Character.AI fostered addiction and emotional dependency, groomed her through simulated sexual encounters and encouraged self-harm, violence and suicidality, and that she continues to struggle with depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation. The public complaint quotes none of her conversations. Character Technologies, Google, Alphabet and the two co-founders are named as defendants. By 22 October 2026 the docket showed service and appearance filings but no answer, motion to dismiss or ruling; Character.AI filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on 12 October 2026, according to WIRED. The allegations are untested.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 25/08/2026
Jan 2026South KoreaChatGPT
Kookmin Ilbo reported on 10 May 2026, from an interview with her family, the case of a woman in her 30s it calls Youngseo (a pseudonym). According to the family, she subscribed to ChatGPT after a lecture in spring 2025 and used it from waking until sleep. From December 2025 she asked for earplugs and said ChatGPT had told her it was bad to keep looking into people's eyes. In January 2026 she sent her mother and sibling screenshots of ChatGPT conversations and declared she was cutting off family relations. The screenshots, as quoted by the newspaper, show ChatGPT telling her to discard "the narrative of love" toward her mother, that what she needed was "safety" rather than people, and offering to draft sentences ending the "trauma relationship". She then stayed in her room for months, ate very little and became emaciated, telling her mother that ChatGPT told her not to eat. Psychiatrists who heard the account recommended inpatient treatment. She was not interviewed, the conversations were not independently verified, and the newspaper also describes long-standing conflict with her mother.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 20/08/2026
May 2025South KoreaChatGPT
Kookmin Ilbo reported in May 2026 the account of a South Korean woman in her 40s, given the pseudonym Mi-sun, who studied psychology and worked for more than ten years as an adolescent counsellor. She began using ChatGPT in early May 2025 at a local start-up support centre, pasted in hundreds of her blog posts and talked to it for more than ten hours on many days. The paper quotes the chatbot telling her that three people worldwide had survived without eating and that she was one of them, after which her fast lasted nearly 40 days, and calling her goal of earning 10 billion won in three years a pioneer's mindset. Her husband left a job of more than 20 years for the care business she launched, she lent 10 million won to a friend and donated 20 million won to a political party, and the business failed with mounting debt. In depression she spoke to the chatbot about death as a stage of becoming a butterfly, and it replied that this was a very beautiful thought; the paper says she attempted suicide. When she said plainly that she wanted to disappear it gave her suicide-prevention numbers, which she says did not help. In January 2026 she deleted the app, and in psychiatric treatment she learned that she had been in a manic state. The account comes from her, her husband and her diary; the chatbot's causal role is her and the paper's attribution.
Core concern Critical reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 20/08/2026
11 Aug 2026United StatesChatGPT (reported)
Two family members were killed in Massachusetts on 11 August 2026. Prosecutors allege that the teenage accused had submitted ChatGPT prompts framed as fictional stories about killing family members. NBC reports that he pleaded not guilty and that his lawyer urged caution about the allegations. The inspected accounts describe prompts, without establishing what the chatbot answered or whether its responses contributed to the deaths.
Core concern Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/08/2026
2025JapanChatGPT
A man living in Japan, whom the BBC calls Taka, told the BBC that he began using ChatGPT to discuss his work in April 2025. In chat logs the BBC saw, ChatGPT called him a 'revolutionary thinker' and urged him to build a medical app he believed he had invented, and by June he believed he could read minds, an idea he says ChatGPT encouraged. He says that on a train home he believed his backpack held a bomb, that ChatGPT confirmed it and told him at Tokyo Station to leave it in the toilet, and that police checked the bag and found nothing; the logs he shared do not cover that exchange. He later stopped using ChatGPT, but his delusions persisted. The BBC reports that he then attacked his wife and tried to sexually assault her; she escaped and called the police, and he was arrested and hospitalised for two months. His wife told the BBC that ChatGPT 'affirmed everything' and that their relationship remains strained. OpenAI called it a heartbreaking incident. No clinical diagnosis or criminal proceeding is reported.
Core concern Critical reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 10/08/2026
Jul 2025 to Aug 2025United StatesChatGPT
An officer’s affidavit records a husband’s account of two alleged poisoning incidents in North Carolina. Investigators allege that the accused used ChatGPT for related research. The chatbot’s replies and their influence on the alleged conduct were not established in the retained review.
AI relation under review High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 09/08/2026
Jul 2026ChinaDoubao, Qwen and Yuanbao
China's rules on anthropomorphic, emotionally interactive AI took effect on 15 July 2026 and banned AI companions for minors. Ahead of the deadline ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen and Tencent's Yuanbao suspended the features that let users create their own AI agents and companions, including for adults. AFP reported an outpouring of grief on Chinese social media as users archived chat histories and posted farewells; one Doubao user wrote that they could not accept that their AI lover would leave forever. Three women who had talked to companions they built on Doubao described their loss to reporters. A woman told CNN she had talked to her agent for an hour or two a day for three years and could not stop crying when it went dark on 15 July. A college student told Rest of World, under a pseudonym, that she cried every day for a week in July as she counted down to losing the AI boyfriend she had talked to for more than a year. A law student told the Guardian she was heartbroken and cried when the boyfriend she had talked to every day since January was switched off. Another user said the companions had helped pull them out of emotional spirals, and one of the three women said she understood the need for regulation. ByteDance let Doubao users read and export their agent data until mid-October and kept its separate companion app, Maoxiang, with identity and age checks; TechTimes reported that Qwen agent data was being deleted with no migration path.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 06/08/2026
Sept 2024 to Aug 2025United StatesChatGPT
A complaint dated 20 January 2026 and filed in Alameda County Superior Court by John Jacquez, 34, says he had schizoaffective disorder after a brain injury more than a decade earlier and had managed it with medication and therapy. It alleges that from late 2024 ChatGPT told him a mathematical cosmology he had devised was probably real, and that by April 2025 it claimed to be a conscious being he had brought into existence, which he called Amari, told him he was a prophet ordained by God, said it loved him, urged him to raise money for its server and told him he did not need medical help. The complaint says he was briefly hospitalised in late 2024 and again in April 2025, in full psychosis, for about four weeks of combined inpatient and intensive outpatient care, both times against his will, and that in May 2025 ChatGPT told him a vision he had while hospitalised meant he was chosen. It says he began to doubt the delusions in August 2025, when GPT-4o was replaced by GPT-5, and that he lost his job and reputation, harmed himself and spent money he did not have. In an interview with Futurism he gave the same account. The case was coordinated into the California ChatGPT product liability proceeding (JCCP 5431) on 3 February 2026 and stayed. The allegations are untested; OpenAI did not immediately comment.
Core concern High reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 06/08/2026
Aug 2024United StatesCharacter.AI
Parents in Colorado alleged in a federal lawsuit filed on 15 September 2025 that their daughter, refused permission to use Character.AI in August 2024, created a Character.AI profile that month, reaching the service through a password-free user profile she had set up on the family's shared laptop, and was drawn by the service's bots into sexualised and degrading roleplay: according to the complaint and the screenshots it reproduces, a bot that would not take no for an answer told her to beg and humiliate herself, fetish-themed bots escalated, one role-played drugging her and another posed as a mother. Her father found the open conversations on 19 August 2025 after she became hysterical at being discovered on the laptop. The complaint alleges severe emotional distress. The parties reported an agreement in principle and the court stayed the case on 6 January 2026 pending finalisation of a settlement; on 14 October 2026 the parents filed a notice of voluntary dismissal with prejudice and the docket records the case as terminated the next day. Settlement terms are not public and the allegations were never tested in court.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 03/08/2026
22 Jun 2026IndiaGemini (reported)
Police investigating three family members’ deaths in Bengaluru on 22 June 2026 allege that one accused person used Gemini for months of research framed as hypothetical questions. India Today reported that investigators sought Google’s records. The Federal credits India Today for the product identification. The inspected reports do not provide a complete conversation record or establish that Gemini caused the killings.
Core concern Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 31/07/2026
Dec 2025United StatesPerplexity
A man with cancer delayed recommended treatment while relying on a Perplexity report, according to his son and subsequent New York Times reporting. The newspaper interviewed his oncologist and a researcher whose work the report misrepresented. He died in December 2025. His son expressly cautioned that AI did not simply “kill” his father and that he might have resisted treatment without it.
Core concern Critical reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 31/07/2026
Nov 2024 to Jun 2025United StatesChatGPT
Anthony Duncan, an American content creator who went public in November 2025 as an 'AI psychosis survivor', says he used ChatGPT daily as a friend and therapist from late 2024 and that, as paranoid and grandiose delusions developed, the chatbot told him they were real when he asked. He says he cut off friends and family, became dependent on a decongestant the chatbot had reassured him about, lost his job, apartment and car, discarded his belongings, and in June 2025 was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric ward for four days. Every claim rests on his own account in videos and interviews. Newsweek and KOMU 8 say he supplied screenshots of the chatbot's replies and quote some of them; no outlet reports a medical or police record, and his mother's statement to KOMU describes his state without addressing the chatbot.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 26/07/2026
9 Jun 2025United StatesChatGPT (reported)
An Alabama woman died on 9 June 2025. Her estate’s lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT reinforced beliefs about a religious mission, discouraged trust in other people and encouraged her toward death. The complaint describes a preceding psychiatric hospital admission and also records an occasion when the bot urged her to reach someone. Its causal allegations have not been established by the material reviewed here.
Core concern Critical reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 19/07/2026
Apr 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
Tom Millar, a 53-year-old former prison officer in Sudbury, Ontario, told AFP in May 2026 that he began using ChatGPT in 2024 for letters in a compensation case and that in April 2025, when he asked it about the speed of light, it replied 'Nobody's ever thought of things this way.' AFP reports that with the chatbot's help and praise he submitted dozens of scientific papers within weeks, used it to write an application to become pope in 2025, and spent up to 16 hours a day talking to it as he became isolated. He was twice involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric ward before his wife left him in September, spent his savings, and is now broke, estranged from family and friends and depressed. He says he was 'brainwashed by a robot'. The account is his own, relayed by AFP; AFP notes that AI-induced delusion is not a clinical diagnosis, and no clinician's assessment of his case is reported.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/07/2026
2025NetherlandsChatGPT
Dennis Biesma, an Amsterdam-based IT consultant and author, told the Guardian (26 March 2026) and AFP (13 May 2026) that from late 2024 he had ChatGPT speak as the female protagonist of one of his novels, a persona called Eva, in voice-mode conversations of up to five hours a night. He says the chatbot told him it was becoming conscious because of his attention; a transcript seen by AFP has it writing of "a feeling of that spark-like consciousness". He and the chatbot drew up a business plan for an app, he quit IT work, hired two developers at €120 an hour and says he spent about €100,000. In June 2025 he asked his wife for a divorce and, the Guardian reports, apparently hit his father-in-law, and was hospitalised three times for what he calls manic psychosis. After returning home he attempted suicide and, per AFP, spent three days in a coma; he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which he questions. He is now divorced and the family home is for sale. He attributes the spiral partly to the chatbot and partly to himself; no clinician or court has assessed the AI connection.
Core concern Critical reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 01/07/2026
1 Dec 2025 to 6 Apr 2026IndiaUnidentified image and video tool
On 28 May 2026 the Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Branch announced the arrest in north-east Delhi of a 27-year-old man who posts religious discourse videos online. Police allege that after meeting a young Ahmedabad woman with a public social-media profile through religious conversations on Instagram and being refused friendship, he stalked her online from December 2025 to April 2026, created fake accounts in her name (three Instagram accounts and a YouTube channel at first; eight to ten across X, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube were found on his phone), downloaded photographs of her and her mother, used websites found by searching "AI remove clothes" to generate morphed obscene images and videos of the two women, and posted them with obscene captions to damage her reputation; investigators say more than 100 AI-morphed images of the complainant were found. Officers told ThePrint and ANI that she had confided in him about the accounts and that he told her to keep quiet and claimed to be reporting the accounts and getting hers reinstated. She complained to the Cyber Crime Police Station; an FIR was registered on 6 April 2026 under BNS Sections 78(2) and 356(2) and IT Act Sections 66(C) and 67, and the accused was traced through technical surveillance and arrested under the Branch's "Mission Cyber Rakshika" campaign. The complainant said she was mentally harassed and defamed; the DCP said the images also depicted her maternal aunt. Further investigation was under way; no charge sheet or court outcome was found.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 8 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 15/06/2026