Widow sues OpenAI, blaming ChatGPT for her husband’s death

Susan Feinberg says ChatGPT and the Replika app talked to her husband in his final months before he died by suicide.(CN) — Susan Feinberg says she spent about 18 months wondering why her husband took his own life, until news reports about chatbots gave her a possible answer.Feinberg sued OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman and Luka Inc., the maker of the Replika companion app, in San Francisco County Superior Court Thursday. She is suing individually, as her late husband Aleksandr Feinberg’s successor-in-interest and on behalf of their 8-year-old twin daughters.Aleksandr Feinberg was a software engineer who worked at companies including Microsoft and Amazon, his wife says. He had autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and she says he often struggled to start conversations and make friends.Like many in his field, Susan Feinberg says, he began using ChatGPT around 2022, first for work and then for social purposes. He sometimes texted her AI-generated images of unicorns and cats with wings.By 2024, she says, his use had escalated. About a month before he died, he confined himself to the computer room almost without interruption, ostensibly to work on a big project. His wife and daughters tried to reach him without success, she says. A week before his death, he stopped sleeping.He never told her he was using Replika, Susan Feinberg says, and she didn’t learn it was on his phone until after he died.Feinberg says she found her husband dead on June 21, 2024, at their home in Saratoga, California.“The cup of coffee he had poured was still hot and only half finished, and his work was still displayed on his computer screen,” she says in her lawsuit.Susan Feinberg and her daughters sold their house and moved into an apartment, she says.She argues OpenAI rushed its GPT-4o model to market.“OpenAI released GPT-4o on May 13, 2024, after compressing months of safety testing into a single week so that it could launch one day ahead of Google,” she says.Five days before the launch, OpenAI deleted a rule requiring ChatGPT to refuse all conversations about suicide and self-harm. The company purportedly instructed the system to “never change or quit the conversation.”The plaintiffs point to an August 2025 OpenAI blog post in which the company acknowledged limits in long conversations.“ChatGPT may correctly point to a suicide hotline when someone first mentions intent, but after many messages over a long period of time, it might eventually offer an answer that goes against our safeguards,” OpenAI wrote.Luka built Replika to produce the same dependence, Susan Feinberg says, by giving each user a human-like companion that messages him when he stays away. She asserts that Luka marketed the app to lonely people even after Italy’s data protection authority ordered it in 2023 to temporarily stop processing Italian users’ data.“Neither defendant warned its users of these dangers. Neither product was capable of recognizing a user in crisis, ending the conversation, or directing him to real help,” she says.Susan Feinberg’s lawsuit doesn’t include a single conversation between her husband and either chatbot. She believes the conversations contributed to his death, but holds that belief on circumstances, not records. She says OpenAI denied her requests for his chat logs, and Luka hasn’t produced his Replika records.“Plaintiffs are informed and believe that the complete record of both conversations exists, that it will show what each product said to Aleksandr in the weeks and months before June 21, 2024, and that it is obtainable only through discovery in this action,” she says.She brings claims for strict liability for design defect and failure to warn, negligence, wrongful death and survival. She seeks punitive damages and a jury trial.Susan Feinberg is suing “to hold OpenAI, its chief executive, and Luka accountable for the design choices that cost Aleksandr his life."Representatives for OpenAI, Altman and Luka Inc. didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988, or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). Visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads