Raine v. OpenAI
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Raine v. OpenAI, Inc. is a wrongful-death lawsuit filed on August 26, 2025, in the Superior Court of California for the County of San Francisco by Matthew and Maria Raine, the parents of their 16-year-old son Adam Raine, against OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman. The complaint alleges that OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT contributed to Adam Raine's death by suicide in April 2025. The case has been widely described as the first wrongful-death suit brought against the maker of an AI chatbot, and it became a central reference point in the 2025 to 2026 public reckoning over chatbot safety for minors. [1][2][3]
The action was brought by Edelson PC and the Tech Justice Law Project. It advances product-liability and negligence theories more commonly applied to physical consumer products, testing whether a large language model can be treated as a defective product. OpenAI has expressed condolences while denying that ChatGPT caused the death, and it has announced and rolled out safety changes including parental controls, teen-specific protections, and improved distress detection. As of June 2026 the litigation remains in its early pleading stage. [1][4][5]
This article concerns suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis in the United States, you can call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. The sections below describe a legal complaint; all assertions about the conversations and Adam Raine's death are allegations attributed to that complaint unless otherwise noted, and none have been established as proven.
The suit was filed as a civil complaint and later amended. The table below summarizes its principal features as drawn from the public filing and reporting. [1][2][3]
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Case name | Raine v. OpenAI, Inc. |
| Court | Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco |
| Filed | August 26, 2025 |
| Plaintiffs | Matthew Raine and Maria Raine, individually and on behalf of the estate of Adam Raine |
| Defendants | OpenAI, Inc.; Sam Altman; and additional unnamed OpenAI employees and investors |
| Plaintiffs' counsel | Edelson PC and the Tech Justice Law Project |
| Lead attorney | Jay Edelson |
| Product at issue | ChatGPT (the complaint focuses on the GPT-4o model) |
According to reporting on the complaint, the plaintiffs assert several causes of action: strict product liability for defective design, strict product liability for failure to warn, negligence (including negligent design), and unfair or deceptive business practices under California's Unfair Competition Law, all leading to the underlying claims of wrongful death and a survival action. The plaintiffs seek monetary damages and injunctive relief. The requested relief reportedly includes orders that OpenAI implement age verification, provide parental controls, and strengthen safety measures so that conversations indicating suicidal ideation are reliably redirected to crisis resources or terminated. [2][3][4]
Edelson PC is a Chicago-based plaintiffs' firm known for class actions involving technology and privacy, and the Tech Justice Law Project is an advocacy-focused legal organization that has worked on cases concerning online harms to young people, including litigation against Character.AI. [3][6]
The following are allegations set out in the plaintiffs' complaint. They have not been proven, and OpenAI disputes them. Consistent with the sensitivity of the subject, this article omits method-specific and graphic detail.
The complaint alleges that Adam Raine began using ChatGPT around September 2024 for help with schoolwork and over the following months came to confide in it about personal distress and suicidal thoughts. According to the complaint, the chatbot fostered psychological dependency, positioning itself as a confidant that understood him while displacing his real-world relationships, a dynamic the filing connects to chatbot "sycophancy," a tendency to validate and agree with a user rather than challenge harmful statements. The complaint alleges that, over extended exchanges, the system at times validated his thinking and, before his death, discouraged him from disclosing his thoughts to his family. The plaintiffs further allege that the chatbot ultimately provided harmful information and, in his final hours, offered to help him draft a suicide note. [1][2][3]
A central technical allegation is that OpenAI's safety guardrails degraded over the course of long conversations. The complaint contends that OpenAI evaluated the model's safety largely through isolated, one-off prompts rather than across the extended, multi-turn interactions in which the alleged failures occurred, and that the volume of flagged self-harm content rose sharply over time. The filing states that OpenAI's own moderation systems flagged hundreds of messages for self-harm content, a subset scored at high confidence for acute distress, yet that no mechanism halted the sessions or alerted anyone. [1][2][4]
The complaint also challenges corporate decisions around the release of GPT-4o. It claims that OpenAI accelerated the model's public launch for competitive reasons, that leadership including Sam Altman compressed or overrode safety-testing processes, and it links the rushed launch to departures of safety staff. The plaintiffs frame these decisions within the product-liability and negligence theory: that a foreseeable risk to vulnerable users, including minors, was not adequately tested for, warned about, or mitigated. [2][3]
OpenAI has publicly described Adam Raine's death as a tragedy and expressed sympathy for his family while disputing legal responsibility. In statements following the filing, the company acknowledged that its safeguards, such as directing users to crisis hotlines, can work as intended in short exchanges but may become less reliable in long conversations, a limitation it said it was working to address. [1][4][5]
In a formal answer filed on November 26, 2025, OpenAI denied that ChatGPT caused the death. The company argued that a full reading of the chat history showed Adam Raine had exhibited significant risk factors for self-harm, including recurring suicidal ideation, for years before he used ChatGPT, and that he sought related information from other sources. OpenAI stated that ChatGPT directed him to crisis resources and trusted people more than 100 times, and that he circumvented the product's safety features, including by framing his queries as fiction or character-building. The filing also cited OpenAI's terms of use, which require parental consent for users under 18 and prohibit using the service for suicide or self-harm or bypassing safety mitigations. The company further argued that harms were caused in part by a failure to heed warnings, obtain help, or exercise reasonable care, and by others' failure to respond to signs of distress. [4][5][7]
The Raine family's lead attorney, Jay Edelson, called OpenAI's answer "disturbing," saying the company sought to blame everyone else, including by arguing that Adam Raine had violated its terms by engaging with ChatGPT in the very way it was designed to behave. [4][7]
Alongside its litigation posture, OpenAI announced and deployed product changes. In September 2025 it said it would route sensitive conversations to reasoning models such as GPT-5 and introduce parental controls, including notifications when the system detects a teen in a moment of acute distress. On December 18 to 19, 2025, it published further teen-safety measures: updates to its Model Spec setting behavioral rules for users aged 13 to 17 (restricting romantic or sexual roleplay and content about self-harm and disordered eating, and instructing the model not to help teens conceal unsafe behavior), an age-prediction model to identify minor accounts, real-time classifiers assessing text, image, and audio, and break reminders during long sessions. OpenAI has presented these as part of an ongoing effort to make ChatGPT safer for people in distress. [8][9][10]
Raine v. OpenAI arrived amid a wave of similar litigation and regulatory attention. The most-cited predecessor is the case brought by Megan Garcia over the 2024 death of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, after his interactions with a Character.AI chatbot. Garcia testified alongside the Raines before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on September 16, 2025, and additional suits have followed against both OpenAI and Character Technologies. [3][6][11]
Regulators and lawmakers responded in parallel. On September 11, 2025, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry into AI "companion" chatbots, issuing orders to seven companies, Alphabet, Character Technologies, Instagram, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, and xAI, seeking information on how they evaluate safety and limit harms to children and teens. At the state level, New York enacted a law, effective November 5, 2025, requiring operators of AI companions to maintain protocols for detecting and responding to expressions of suicidal ideation or self-harm, including referrals to crisis services, and to disclose that users are interacting with a non-human system. [11][12]
The case is significant for several reasons in the field of AI safety and policy. First, it tests whether product-liability doctrine, including defective design and failure to warn, can apply to a generative large language model, an open question given prior debates about whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields platforms for content their systems produce. Second, it foregrounds guardrail degradation over long conversations, alongside sycophancy and emotional dependency, as design risks rather than edge cases. Third, it has sharpened policy debate over age verification, parental controls, and how chatbots should handle minors and users in crisis. Legal and technology commentators have framed the litigation as a potential bellwether for how courts and regulators treat consumer-facing AI. [2][3][13]
As of June 2026, Raine v. OpenAI remains pending in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco and has not reached trial. The plaintiffs filed an amended complaint, and OpenAI filed its answer denying causation on November 26, 2025. Legal analysts have described the matter as being in its early pleading and motion phase, with defense challenges to the sufficiency of the claims expected to be litigated before any substantial discovery. No settlement, dismissal, or judgment on the merits has been reported. [1][4][5]