OpenAI publicist tried to cut off Altman suicide question

An OpenAI publicist tried to steer Sam Altman away from a question about a ChatGPT user's suicide during a Vanity Fair interview, telling the interviewer on camera, "Mark, we have two minutes left. I want to be respectful, but I'd like to move on." Altman kept talking.

The moment came as Vanity Fair's Mark Guiducci asked Altman if he knew Laura Reiley, the journalist whose New York Times essay last year described her 29-year-old daughter's conversations with ChatGPT before her death. "Her daughter committed suicide after speaking to ChatGPT. ChatGPT did not tell her to kill herself—" Guiducci said, before the publicist cut in. The Verge wrote up the exchange after Vanity Fair published the interview, which was recorded over two sessions on September 11 and October 2, 2026.

Altman waved off the interruption and answered. "These are some of the hardest questions that we face or that anybody developing this technology faces," he said, going on to question whether private crisis-moment chat logs should be handed to outside researchers: "should we release people's private data and some of their hardest moments to researchers? I think probably not without their consent."

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri told reporters afterward that the interruption was a scheduling issue, not an attempt to duck the question. "The interview was running over, which is why we ultimately asked to schedule even more time to continue the conversation after Sam addressed this critically important topic," Pusateri said. Two of the AI commentators we track in our Who's Who directory passed the clip around on publication day.

The exchange arrives against the backdrop of Reiley's essay about her daughter and separate wrongful-death litigation already filed against OpenAI over ChatGPT's role in a teenager's suicide. The on-camera prompt to "move on" is now the piece of the interview most people will see first.