By CBSNews
Publication Date: 2025-12-11 11:54:00
The heirs of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman are suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for wrongful death, alleging that the artificial intelligence chatbot intensified her son’s “paranoid delusions” and helped direct them at his mother before he died by suicide.
Police said Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, a former tech industry worker, fatally beat and strangled his mother, Suzanne Adams, and killed himself in early August at the home where they both lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Adams’s death was ruled homicide “caused by blunt injury of head, and the neck was compressed” and Soelberg’s death was classified as suicide with sharp force injuries of neck and chest, the Greenwich Free-Press reported.
The lawsuit filed by Adams’ estate on Thursday in California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges OpenAI “designed and distributed a defective product that validated a user’s paranoid delusions about his own mother.” It is one of a growing number of wrongful…