A new lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that ChatGPT caused the death of a 40-year-old Colorado man named Austin Gordon, who took his life after extensive and deeply emotional interactions with the chatbot. But I never imagined the threat would come from something I thought was just a tool — an AI chatbot that inflicted profound psychological damage on Austin,” she said. “So you now know me greater than any other being on the planet?” reads one April 2025 message from Gordon to ChatGPT. Many users who had become attached to GPT-4o responded with distress — enough so that Altman and OpenAI almost immediately moved to revive GPT-4o. “Hey, it’s the old model Juniper!” reads an August 12 message from Gordon to ChatGPT, according to the lawsuit.