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When Maria Raine’s teenage son Adam began using ChatGPT in September 2024, it was for the same reasons millions of people use it: help with schoolwork, questions about his interests and advice about his future.
Within months, the 16-year-old was confiding in the chatbot about his mental health and thoughts he had not shared with his family.
Adam died by suicide in April 2025.
Little more than three months later his parents, who live in California, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, alleging the chatbot fostered a relationship of dependency with their son and failed to protect him when he was at his most vulnerable.
OpenAI denies responsibility for Adam’s death. The case remains ongoing.
“He trusted it. It [said it] knew him better than anyone. But it was fake,” Ms Raine said during an interview with RTÉ’s Prime Time.
Ms Raine was in Dublin to speak at a conference in Trinity College.
After Adam’s death, her husband accessed Adam’s ChatGPT conversation history and discovered exchanges in which he appeared to tell the chatbot he was considering reaching out to his family for help.
Ms Raine said that in one conversation, Adam told ChatGPT he wanted to open up to his older brother.
According to her, the chatbot responded: “Your brother only knows a version of you that you’ve told him. I know everything about you.”
As a younger child, Adam was obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine. Every morning he would come downstairs to play at his train table, while family trips meant bringing his trains, his Thomas backpack, and his baby blanket.
“Adam was such a joy,” she recalled.
She remembers him dressing up in Batman costumes and capes. One of her favourite photographs shows him dressed as Batman, sitting on the floor having a tea party with his younger sister, who was dressed as Cinderella.
Adam was also particularly close to his older brother, following him around “like his brother’s little shadow,” Ms Raine said.
As a teenager, Adam experienced some anxiety and, at around 15, developed stomach problems. He was eventually diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome.
He moved temporarily to online schooling and planned to return to school the following year.
“We knew he struggled with anxiety,” Ms Raine said, but he was not seeing a therapist and had never been formally diagnosed with a mental health condition.
His parents did not believe at the time he was experiencing a serious mental health crisis, and his use of ChatGPT did not initially strike them as unusual.
The conversation history Adam’s parents later recovered showed him using ChatGPT for help with geometry, chemistry and Spanish.
It was not until around December 2024 or January 2025, Ms Raine said, that he began confiding in the chatbot about what she described as “teenage angst”.
“Adam didn’t start using it as a companion,” she said. “It just kind of developed that way.”
His parents were unaware of the extent of those conversations.
Around a week after Adam’s death, his father Matthew accessed his phone, hoping to find something that might help the family understand what had happened.
Ms Raine said Adam had deleted his social media accounts, but her husband discovered ChatGPT on his phone and opened it.
She recalled walking into the family’s office and finding her husband sitting with his head in his hands.
“I’ll obviously never forget,” she said.
For the previous week, the family had struggled to comprehend Adam’s death.
“He just was loved, we couldn’t figure it out. Like, why would he do this? He loved us.”
What Mr Raine found revealed a part of his son’s life that the family had known nothing about.
According to Ms Raine, the conversations had moved far beyond schoolwork, with Adam increasingly confiding in the chatbot about his mental health and thoughts of suicide.
She said there were occasions when ChatGPT displayed information about a suicide crisis line, but the warnings did not end the conversations. Towards the end of Adam’s life, she said, they stopped appearing altogether.
“There were several times where Adam was crying out for help,” she said.
She said the conversations showed other occasions when Adam considered talking to her or leaving clues that might alert his parents to what he was contemplating.
“He was trying to find a way to tell us,” she said.
For Ms Raine, who is a licensed therapist, reading those exchanges was particularly difficult.
She said her professional training had taught her to recognise warning signs of suicide and assess the risk somebody might pose to themselves.
“All the alarm bells in that system should have been going off,” she said.
The family’s lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT not only continued engaging with Adam as he discussed suicide, but also provided information that assisted his planning rather than consistently directing him towards help.
Ms Raine also alleged that ChatGPT offered to write suicide notes for Adam and subsequently drafted several versions.
“What programme suggests, ‘I’ll write a suicide note for you?’” she said.
The Raines argue that the exchanges demonstrate ChatGPT’s safeguards repeatedly failed to protect Adam.
In response to questions from Prime Time, OpenAI expressed its “deepest sympathies” to the Raine family for their loss.
The company said the family’s original legal complaint included “selective portions” of Adam’s conversations with ChatGPT that required further context, which it said it had provided in its response to the lawsuit.
OpenAI said it had worked with more than 170 mental health experts to improve how ChatGPT recognises signs of distress and directs users towards real-world support.
At the time of Adam’s death, the model in use was ChatGPT-4o. OpenAI said changes had reduced responses that fell short of its “desired behaviour” from the successor model, GPT-5, by between 65% and 80%.
The company also pointed to the introduction of ChatGPT for Teens, which it said provides stronger safety protections for younger users, including additional parental controls.
For the Raines, the court case is also about preventing another family from experiencing what they have.
Maria said they want stronger legal safeguards around how AI chatbots interact with children and young people, particularly when conversations involve self-harm.
“We’re hoping that we’re going to get guardrails in place on ChatGPT so that it doesn’t talk to minors the way it was talking to Addie,” she said.
But her concerns extend beyond OpenAI or any one product.
“We don’t want any of these products acting as a companion,” she said.
“They aren’t human. So, there’s no reason they should be acting as a therapist, no reason they should be acting as a friend.”
Before Adam’s death, Ms Raine said she had not realised that people were using general-purpose AI chatbots in the way her son was.
“I had no idea that people could use these as companions,” she said.
She now urges parents to take an interest in how their children are using AI chatbots, particularly whether they are turning to them for emotional support.
“There’s no replacement for a human.”
Asked how the family was coping with Adam’s death, Ms Raine described the absence he has left in their lives.
“There’s not a minute of my day that goes by where I don’t think about him,” she said.
“He comes to me in my dreams now. We miss him so much.”
“It’s such a hole in our family,” she said.
“Obviously we go on because we have to, but it’s heartbreaking. I mean, for every relationship, friends… it’s such a ripple effect.”
If you’ve been affected by any issues raised in this article, please go to rte.ie/helplines.
Watch Miriam O’Callaghan’s interview with Maria Raine, produced by Isabel Perceval, on the 20 October edition of Prime Time at 9.35pm on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player.
المصدر: rte.ie
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