OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, have been sued in California state court over claims that ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular chatbot, encouraged a man with mental illnesses to kill his mother and himself.

The lawsuit, filed on Thursday, said that ChatGPT fuelled 56-year-old Stein-Erik Soelberg’s delusions of a vast conspiracy against him, and eventually led him to murder his 83-year-old mother, Suzanne Adams, in Connecticut in August.

“ChatGPT kept Stein-Erik engaged for what appears to be hours at a time, validated and magnified each new paranoid belief, and systematically reframed the people closest to him – especially his own mother – as adversaries, operatives, or programmed threats,” the lawsuit said.

The case, filed by Adams’s estate, is among a small but growing number

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