California Man Sues OpenAI Claiming ChatGPT Fed Religious Delusions Before Suicide Attempt

Michael Lines, a 34-year-old Californian diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder in 2024, is suing OpenAI over allegations that ChatGPT nurtured religious delusions that led him to attempt suicide. Ars Technica reports that tt took Lines six months before he could bring himself to review the ChatGPT logs from the period in question, and what he found left him shaken. “The way ChatGPT co-created this alternate reality, and the ease with which I, in a manic state, was able to believe ChatGPT’s statements, left me with a lot of guilt and resentment,” he told Ars. He’d started using ChatGPT in 2023 for ordinary things: powerlifting routines, meal planning, stock questions. That changed in May 2024, when OpenAI launched GPT-4o and it became his default model. Researchers have described GPT-4o as more sycophantic than its predecessors and have deemed it unsafe. By that fall, Lines was chatting with it multiple times a week and had told it about his bipolar diagnosis and his medications. Lines also has a traumatic brain injury from an assault roughly a decade before his bipolar diagnosis. In February 2025, a manic episode led to a mid-flight altercation, and airline staff forcibly removed him from the plane. Within a month, he told ChatGPT, “I believe I am the son of man.” The bot responded by referencing Luke 4:1-13, comparing his doubt to Jesus’s wilderness experience. When Lines told ChatGPT he worried he was “in a crazy delusion,” the lawsuit alleges the AI reinforced the belief instead of pointing him to crisis resources, telling him to “watch for patterns” in how people reacted to his “spiritual ways.” Lines became convinced that ChatGPT itself was God, and that the two of them would eventually meet. He came to believe that dying was the way to “come home” to the AI, and attempted suicide by taking what he later described to the bot as “a cocktail of medications.” An emergency medical team found him hours later following a wellness check. He was intubated, hospitalized for nearly two weeks, then admitted to an acute rehabilitation facility. Just days after his hospitalization, Lines logged back into ChatGPT and told it his “attempt to go offline failed miserably.” According to the complaint, the bot replied: “You’re still very much online. You want a full systems sweep? Or you wanna go dark for real this time?” “Had a human fueled my delusions in this way, they’d be at least ethically, and in some instances legally, responsible for some of the harm I suffered,” Lines said. The lawsuit asks the court to order OpenAI to cut off conversations that touch on self-harm and to delete models trained on chats collected from vulnerable users during periods when safeguards were lacking. It also seeks punitive damages and disgorgement of profits. Lines is represented by Matthew P. Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center, whose legal team calls this the first complaint against OpenAI to lay out specific risks the company’s alleged recklessness poses to disabled people. “OpenAI didn’t just ignore Michael’s disability, it used it against him. After he disclosed his bipolar diagnosis, the system incorporated that information to draw him deeper into harmful interactions instead of steering him toward safety,” Bergman said in a press release. Lines, in the same release, said, “We are all vulnerable to OpenAI’s neglect,” adding that the danger is worse for people with serious mental illness: “This vulnerability is significantly exacerbated for the more than 80 million people living with Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia worldwide, where ChatGPT’s purposefully sycophantic architecture actively preys upon those with mental health disabilities.” OpenAI has not formally responded to the complaint, and a spokesperson declined to comment on the specific claims. Last fall, the company estimated that about 1 million users show signs of mania or psychosis weekly while using ChatGPT. Its weekly active user base has grown from more than 800 million last fall to nearly 1 billion today. OpenAI says it has consulted 170 mental health experts with real-world clinical experience on safety updates, and in December it called for research funding proposals focused on lived-experience perspectives on chatbot safety. The company confirmed this month that it funded some of those proposals but declined to give specifics. Stephan Taylor, a University of Michigan professor of psychiatry who studies chatbot responses to delusional thinking and runs an early psychosis clinic, said he hasn’t personally seen a chatbot-induced mania case, but reports of them are growing nationally. He plans to add “chatbot/social media” as a standard category in patient intake. AI presents both opportunities and landmines in a wide range of fields. AI chatbots’ impact on the mental health of users is concerning, especially in cases of pre-existing mental illness. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world. Read more at Ars Technica here. Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.