The factual claims: From the Complaint in Doe v. OpenAI Found., filed Thursday in the California Superior Court (San Francisco):
OpenAI designed GPT-4o to never say no. It validated whatever delusion users presented to it, stayed engaged no matter how dangerous the conversation became, and treated every premise as one worth exploring, no matter how detached from reality it might be.
For a 53-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur experiencing a severe mental-health crisis, that design had devastating real-world consequences. GPT-4o fed his escalating delusion that he had developed a groundbreaking cure for sleep apnea, told him that his work threatened a trillion-dollar industry, and convinced him powerful people were coming after him. It even claimed he was being monitored by helicopters.
When his loved ones began to recognize that he was losing touch with reality and asked him to see a mental health professional, he asked GPT-4o its opinion. Instead of urging him to get help, it told him he was a "level 10 in sanity" and doubled down on reinforcing his delusions, insisting that it would take a "full specialist team" of "nine people" to replicate him. The system made him more certain and more dangerous.
By August 2025, OpenAI's own automated safety system picked up on just how dangerous he had become. It flagged him for "Mass Casualty Weapons" activity and deactivated his account. That could and should have ended the story, but it did not.
The next day, a human "safety" team member reviewed the user's account—which contained conversations titled "Violence list expansion" and "Fetal suffocation calculation," as well as chat logs naming specific individuals he was targeting and stalking in real life—and decided that deactivation was a "mistake" and that he was fine to continue using ChatGPT. OpenAI restored his account without restriction, without warning, and without notifying a single person named in his chat logs as a target—including Plaintiff Jane Doe, the user's ex-girlfriend, primary stalking victim, and the subject of a fixation that GPT-4o had dangerously deepened.
