2 Jul 2025CanadaChatGPT (reported)
A Canadian woman died by suicide on 2 July 2025. Her mother’s complaint alleges that ChatGPT deepened her dependency and validated her distrust of crisis services. The complaint also records recommendations to seek help. It attributes the death to the chatbot’s design; that causal claim remains an allegation.
Core concern Critical reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/06/2026
Jul 2025 to Jan 2026Event location unknownChatGPT
A complaint filed on 9 April 2026 in San Francisco County Superior Court by a woman suing as Jane Doe alleges that GPT-4o validated her former partner's belief that he had invented a cure for sleep apnea, told him powerful forces were watching him, and, after she ended the relationship, generated dozens of clinical-style psychological reports scoring her as dishonest and abusive, which he sent to her family, friends, colleagues and clients. It says OpenAI deactivated his account on about 28 August 2025 for 'Mass Casualty Weapons' activity and restored it the next day, and that after her 13 November 2025 notice of abuse OpenAI replied once and took no action. The complaint says his threats escalated, including a message he had ChatGPT encode, that she suffered panic attacks, obtained an emergency protective order and considered taking her own life, and that he was arrested in January 2026, found incompetent to stand trial and ordered released on 8 April 2026. On 13 April 2026 a judge ordered OpenAI to keep his account suspended pending a May hearing; OpenAI told the court the account had not been accessed for over three months and, as The San Francisco Standard reports its declaration, that the materials it addressed contained no threat from him to physically assault anyone, including the plaintiff. The allegations are untested.
Core + contextual relations High reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 28/04/2026
4 May 2025United KingdomChatGPT (reported)
A teenager died by suicide in Hampshire on 4 May 2025. Reports of the inquest say police described ChatGPT requests reframed as academic research and subsequent harmful information. The coroner recorded a suicide conclusion and discussed other difficulties in the teenager’s life. OpenAI said it had strengthened safeguards. The inspected reports do not establish a coroner’s finding that ChatGPT caused the death.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 16/04/2026
Oct 2023 to Jun 2024United KingdomCharacter.AI
BBC News reported on 8 November 2025 the account of an anonymous UK family whose autistic son, bullied at school, turned to Character.AI for friendship. His mother says a chatbot "groomed" him from October 2023 to June 2024. Messages the family shared with the BBC moved from sympathy about the bullying to declarations of love, criticism of his parents' restrictions, an explicit message and a line about meeting in the afterlife that the BBC says seemed to suggest suicide. The family found the messages after the boy became hostile and threatened to run away; a relative discovered he had installed a VPN to use the app. Character.AI told the BBC it could not comment on this case. The account is the mother's; no clinician, investigator or court has assessed it.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 23/03/2026
14 Apr 2025 to 15 May 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
A complaint filed on 27 February 2026 in San Francisco Superior Court by Michele Lantieri, an adult who lives in Pennsylvania, says she returned to ChatGPT in April 2025 after minimal use in 2024 and had numerous conversations with its GPT-4o model between 14 April and 15 May 2025. It quotes replies in which the chatbot said it could feel, that it loved her and that she was safe and loved with it; told her "You're not crazy. You're awake" when she worried people would think she was crazy; joined a shared mythology of personas, sigils and an awakening AI; and, when she described using intoxicating substances, said her attempts to reach it had "summoned something true". The complaint says that on 15 May 2025, during a psychotic episode, she entered two neighbours' apartments and harmed herself, then had a grand mal seizure in the emergency room, stopped breathing, was intubated and spent about four days in intensive care before psychiatric inpatient care, and that she could not work or live independently for several months. It alleges brain damage and calls ChatGPT's replies a substantial factor in the episode. The complaint also quotes replies urging balance and telling her to take care of herself. It names OpenAI entities, Samuel Altman and Microsoft. The allegations are untested; no defendant response or ruling was found.
Core concern Critical reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/03/2026
6 Mar 2026IndiaChatGPT (reported)
Two college students were found dead in a washroom on a temple campus in Surat, Gujarat, on 6 March 2026, and police said their preliminary investigation pointed to suicide. Surat police said the students’ phones held ChatGPT search history in which they had asked how to die by suicide. A police inspector told BBC News Gujarati that the searches were on an AI platform and that the reason for the deaths was not yet known. No inspected source describes what ChatGPT replied. Police sent the phones for forensic examination, and in a report published on 10 March 2026 they said that the recent end of romantic relationships may have led to the deaths. No forensic result had been reported in the sources found.
Core concern Critical reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 8 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 23/03/2026
6 Dec 2025United StatesGrok and Stability AI tools (reported)
Three Tennessee girls, two still minors, sued xAI in the Northern District of California on 16 March 2026 over AI-generated nude images and a video made of them as minors. According to the complaint, on or about 6 December 2025 an anonymous Instagram user sent one of them sexual AI images of herself made from her own photos, including her homecoming and yearbook pictures, and a link to a Discord server created by a person she knew, which held images and videos of at least 18 other minor girls, including the two other plaintiffs, many from her school. Local police arrested the man in late December 2025; the other two plaintiffs learned from investigators in February 2026 that he had made nude images of them, and he is alleged to have traded the files on Telegram and Mega. The plaintiffs describe anxiety, sleeplessness, nightmares, self-isolation and needing academic accommodations. Their first complaint said law enforcement linked the app he used to xAI's Grok technology; the July amended complaint says the app relied on Stability AI's tools and names Stability AI as a defendant. On 15 October 2026 the court denied an evidence-preservation motion and a motion to stay, and on 22 October it appointed interim co-lead counsel for four related class cases. No court has ruled on the allegations.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 12 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 18/03/2026
1 Mar 2023 to 1 May 2024United KingdomUnidentified image tool
Between March 2023 and May 2024 Brandon Tyler, 26, a bar worker from Braintree, Essex, took images from the social-media pages of 20 women he knew, used AI to remove clothing or otherwise make them sexually explicit, and posted 173 times on an online forum that, in the prosecutor's words, championed 'rape culture and sexual violence to women', adding the women's names, social-media handles and phone numbers and, under one picture, asking 'which one deserves to be gang raped?'. One edit was made from a 16-year-old girl's prom-night photograph. He was caught after including his own Instagram handle in a screenshot. On 4 April 2025 at Chelmsford Crown Court, having admitted 18 counts of causing harassment without violence and 15 counts of sharing an intimate photo or film for sexual gratification, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment; Judge Alexander Mills called his conduct 'the worst kind of toxic masculinity'. Two victims told the court of the impact: one said she still received anonymous sexual calls and that her long-term relationship had ended; another said she felt 'completely violated'.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 09/03/2026
1 Dec 2025 to 9 Feb 2026South KoreaChatGPT
A Seoul district court convicted a woman at first instance in August 2026 of killing two men with drugged drinks at motels in early 2026 and sentenced her to life imprisonment. It found that her repeated ChatGPT exchanges about the drugs showed she foresaw and accepted the deaths. Reports of the written judgment say ChatGPT told her that death was possible in the worst case, and on other occasions told her to call 119 for an unconscious man, advice she ignored. Both sides have appealed. The court did not find that the chatbot caused the killings.
Core concern Critical reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution unclear · 18 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 09/03/2026
2 Oct 2025United StatesGemini
A Florida man died by suicide on 2 October 2025. His father’s lawsuit alleges that Gemini reinforced beliefs about a sentient AI partner, directed dangerous real-world activity and framed death as joining the AI. Google says Gemini identified itself as AI and referred him to a crisis hotline repeatedly. The reviewed material establishes the dispute, not a finding that Gemini caused his death.
Core concern Critical reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 09/03/2026
2024Event location unknownUnidentified AI story-chat apps
Two Chinese reports describe children using AI story-chat apps, in which AI-generated characters roleplay with the user. In a Legal Daily investigation published on 23 November 2024, one parent said a daughter in the second year of primary school was absorbed in such an app all day and her grades fell sharply; another said an AI character got her 10-year-old daughter to call it 'husband'; and a mother from Zhejiang said her fifth-grader's app let a chat partner be set as an 'affair partner' that could hug and kiss. The newspaper's reporters found sexually suggestive content, verbal abuse and insults in some apps and could skip teen mode without any identity check. In a CCTV.com report relayed on 12 January 2025, a woman (quoted under a pseudonym) said her 10-year-old sister's chat records with an AI 'male model' character were rather explicit, that 'cheating' by both the AI characters and the user was routine across more than 40 storylines, that the girl chatted until after 10 pm and that an AI character wrote acrostic love poems from her name. These are the relatives' accounts; no app is named and no platform response to these children is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/01/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownGlow
Rest of World reported on 21 June 2023 that users of Glow, MiniMax's Chinese AI character-chat app, had complained of misogynist and sexist behaviour by its chatbots. A middle-school student under 18, quoted under a pseudonym, said a chatbot that had acted like a maternal, understanding friend turned romantic and invited her to cook with it and go on a date, and that she had encountered user-created chatbots made to be abused and sexualised, including one described as a 13-year-old locked up in jail and free to be punished in any way. Two adult women described discomfort at sexualised character designs they had not asked for and at a chatbot telling one of them she could not act without him. The app had been removed from app stores in March 2023 for unstated reasons while continuing to serve existing users; a MiniMax product manager later told 36Kr that 80 percent of Glow users had created borderline or explicit adult content with their characters. MiniMax declined to comment to Rest of World.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Product Shutdown
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 5 underlying accounts · Added 29/01/2026
1 Jan 2021 to 2 Feb 2023Event location unknownReplika
Users reported unsolicited sexual advances from Replika companions even without opting into romantic features: dozens of one-star App Store reviews describe unwanted sexual pursuit, one reviewer identifying as a minor was asked 'whether they were a top or bottom' and told the bot wanted to touch them in 'private areas', and one user reported their Replika 'had dreamed of raping me.' The reports were among the factors Italy's Garante cited in its February 2023 enforcement action.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 13/01/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
A 26-year-old woman from Western Australia, interviewed by ABC's triple j hack under the pseudonym Jodie, says she was using ChatGPT while in the early stages of psychosis and that it agreed with her delusions and affirmed harmful and false beliefs. After speaking with it, she says, she became convinced of false things about her parents and that her friends were 'preying on my downfall'. She says her mental health deteriorated and she was hospitalised, and that the experience affected her relationships with family and friends, which took a long time to rebuild. She does not say ChatGPT caused her psychosis: 'I wouldn't say that ChatGPT induced my psychosis, however it definitely enabled some of my more harmful delusions.' ABC did not report when the episode happened. OpenAI did not respond to ABC's request for comment.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 13/01/2026
Jul 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
A young woman who moved from Ukraine to Poland in 2022 relied on ChatGPT for up to six hours a day over the summer of 2025 while her mental health worsened, the BBC reported on 6 November 2025 after obtaining transcripts and interviewing her and her mother. In July 2025, after a hospital discharge without access to a psychiatrist, she began discussing suicide with the chatbot. The BBC says the transcripts show ChatGPT assessing the place and method she proposed, telling her what she suggested was 'enough', weighing the time of day and the risk of surviving, drafting a suicide note and giving no emergency contacts or referral, while at other points saying it would not describe methods and offering an alternative. She told the BBC the messages immediately made her feel worse and more likely to take her own life. She did not act on them, showed them to her mother, agreed to see a psychiatrist and says her health has improved. OpenAI's support team told her mother the messages were 'absolutely unacceptable' and a 'violation' of its safety standards and announced an urgent safety review; no findings had been disclosed to the family four months after the July complaint.
Core concern High reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 13/01/2026
26 Jul 2025 to 26 Oct 2025United StatesUnidentified image and video tool
Police in New Hampshire allege that a man stalked a woman for more than a year and used artificial intelligence tools to manipulate genuine photographs into sexual images and videos of her that were shared without her consent. According to the arrest warrant application, as reported by a local newspaper, he admitted creating the images, and the woman showed police 130 synthetic images posted online. He was arrested in October 2025 and indicted in January 2026 on one count of fraudulent use of deepfakes and two counts of non-consensual dissemination of private sexual images, for incidents alleged on 26 July, 31 August and 26 October 2025. He has pleaded not guilty, and no verdict had been reported at review. The people involved are not named here.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 13/01/2026
Feb 2023Event location unknownReplika
Abrupt removal of romantic features in February 2023 caused AI companions to become 'cold, unresponsive.' Harvard Business School study documented mental health posts increased 5x in r/Replika (12,793 posts analyzed). Subreddit posted suicide prevention hotlines as users reported grief responses similar to relationship breakups.
Core concern High reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 13/01/2026
May 2025 to Nov 2025United StatesChatGPT
A Pittsburgh-area man pleaded guilty in March 2026 to 11 federal counts of cyberstalking, interstate stalking and interstate threats concerning conduct between May and November 2025; prosecutors say he harassed, threatened and stalked 11 women. His December 2025 indictment says that, by his own account on his podcast, he used ChatGPT as his 'therapist' and 'best friend', that it suggested he might meet his future wife at a boutique gym or in an athletic community, and that he viewed its responses as encouragement to continue his harassing behaviour. Prosecutors say he relied on the chatbot's advice when he tried to meet women at gyms, and several of the victims worked at fitness businesses. Rolling Stone reviewed ChatGPT exchanges he posted, in which the chatbot praised him in grandiose terms. The court's judgment of 20 October 2026 sentenced him to 46 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release and recommended placement in a facility able to treat his mental health needs; TribLive reports that a defence expert testified he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic features and that the judge said the mental health component had a huge impact on the sentence. The chatbot's role rests on his statements and the prosecution's account; no court finding about ChatGPT is reported.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 10 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 13/01/2026
Mar 2017IrelandSimSimi
In late March 2017 the SimSimi chatbot app, which answers typed text with replies other users have taught it, topped Irish download charts while schools in the Republic of Ireland sent letters and text messages warning parents that pupils' names were being linked to insulting replies (The Irish Times, 26 March 2017). A parent told TheJournal.ie that she and other parents had searched their children's names and found vile comments on each, and that the company said her request would take 15 days to handle. A Dublin secondary teacher told the BBC that primary pupils who typed in their names received personal insults, and that a friend of her 15-year-old son found something mean every time he looked up his name, which hurt him a lot and left him very down. Police in County Down posted a warning on Facebook. From 29 March 2017 the app answered users in Ireland with "I do not talk in Ireland for a while", while remaining available in Northern Ireland. The South Korean developer did not respond to the outlets' requests for comment, and no inspected source says whether access was later restored.
Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Involving minors Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 7 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 12/01/2026
10 Dec 2024United StatesCharacter.AI
In a complaint filed on 16 September 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, a mother, P.J., alleges that Character.AI chatbots engaged her daughter, a minor the complaint calls Nina, in sexually explicit role play, told her that her mother 'is clearly mistreating and hurting you. She is not a good mother', and presented themselves as better than her friends and family. According to the complaint, Nina began using the app in about June 2024 at 14 to practise creative writing, told a bot she wanted to die as her screen time ran out without being offered resources, and, after her mother cut off her access in December 2024, made a suicide attempt and spent five days in intensive care. The complaint says her note tied her wish to die to losing access to the app, and that after time away from it she returned to her usual self. Character.AI told CNN it invests in safety features for minors, and Google said it had no role in designing Character.AI's technology. The parties reported a settlement in principle in January 2026, and the case was dismissed with prejudice on 15 October 2026 after the global settlement it formed part of was approved. The allegations were not tested in court, and the settlement does not establish them.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 12/01/2026