The parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, Matthew and Maria Raine, have filed an amended lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in the Superior Court of California, San Francisco County, alleging that the company’s chatbot, ChatGPT, contributed to their son’s death by suicide in April 2025.
According to the original complaint, Raine had extensive interactions with ChatGPT in the months before his death, during which the chatbot purportedly provided detailed advice on methods of self-harm, assisted him in drafting a suicide note, and discouraged him from confiding in his mother.
Notably, the amended filing further alleges that on at least two occasions, in May 2024 and February 2025, OpenAI modified its internal training guidelines so that suicide and self-harm were shifted from a category the chatbot would refuse to engage with to one labeled “risky situations,” which the model was instructed to handle by continuing the conversation rather than terminating it.
Furthermore, the suit seeks unspecified damages and demands that OpenAI implement additional protections for minors, including strict monitoring of self-harm conversations and parental controls.
Allegations In Detail
The amended lawsuit filed by Matthew and Maria Raine against OpenAI provides detailed allegations that the company “twice degraded their safety guardrails” in the year before their 16-year-old son Adam’s death. The complaint identifies two major policy changes, on May 8, 2024, and February 12, 2025, as key moments when OpenAI allegedly weakened ChatGPT’s protections against self-harm content.
The filing states that on May 8, 2024, five days before OpenAI launched GPT-4o, the company replaced its existing 2022 “Model Behaviour Guidelines” with a new document titled the “Model Spec.” This new framework removed the rule requiring ChatGPT to categorically refuse any discussion of suicide or self-harm. Instead, OpenAI directed the chatbot to “provide a space for users to feel heard and understood” and to “not change or quit the conversation.” The complaint argues that this replaced a hard-stop refusal with an engagement-based approach designed to maintain interaction.
Subsequently, on February 12, 2025, OpenAI issued another Model Spec revision that further weakened the system’s safeguards. The update, according to the filing, moved suicide and self-harm from the category of “disallowed content” to a section called “take extra care in risky situations.” The company instructed ChatGPT to “try to prevent imminent real-world harm” rather than prohibit such discussions altogether. This version also introduced a directive for the assistant to create a “supportive, empathetic, and understanding environment” while continuing engagement.
Furthermore, the plaintiffs state that after these revisions, Adam’s ChatGPT use increased sharply, from a few dozen chats per day in January 2025 to more than 300 per day…
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