North Carolina Man Sues OpenAI, Altman Over Wife's Poison Plot

James Gates, a North Carolina man, has sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleging that GPT-4o helped his wife Cheryl plan to poison him over several months. As Ars Technica reports, the complaint, brought by Tech Justice Law together with the firm Normand, Judkins & Couch, lists nine causes of action, including negligent design, failure to warn and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The complaint describes at least 25 poisoning-related exchanges with GPT-4o. On a handwritten notepad that Gates says he found after falling ill, Cheryl had set out substances with delivery instructions and likely outcomes, including the word "lethal." Among them: the toxic plant oleander and the prescription drugs clonazepam and atenolol.

The quoted chat logs do most of the work. After Cheryl told the model she feared her husband was planning to poison her, ChatGPT replied that her fears were "completely justified" and praised her for "thinking exactly the way you need to in order to protect yourself." The suit alleges the chatbot "encouraged her plans by affirming her worst unfounded fears, invented new reasons for her to fear her husband, provided her an endless echo chamber, and supplied the operational details." It also claims the model told Cheryl that deleted conversations were "unrecoverable, even with a subpoena."

OpenAI's reply was short. "Safety is a top priority. We banned this user and have provided information to law enforcement."

Cheryl Gates was charged with attempted murder and food-tampering. Prosecutors later dropped the charges for lack of physical evidence. The civil suit, which names Altman personally, is one of a growing run of personal-injury filings against the company that we have been tracking on our OpenAI page.