OpenAI Sued for Allegedly Triggering Massacre and Leading College Student to Accidentally Overdose

OpenAI is feeling the heat again after being sued for allegedly triggering a mass shooting!

According to NBC News, the suit claims the shooter followed advice from the artificial intelligence company’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT, to carry out the April 2025 attack that left two people dead at Florida State University.

Meanwhile, the family of a 19-year-old college student is also suing OpenAI over claims that his conversations with ChatGPT led to an accidental overdose.

The federal lawsuit — filed by the widow of one shooting victim — says OpenAI should have built ChatGPT with guardrails to detect and prevent such crimes.

OpenAI “put their profits over our safety and it killed my husband. They need to be responsible before another family has to go through this,” Vandana Joshi said in a statement through her attorney, via Associated Press.

Her suit also names Phoenix Ikner, who’s accused of the carnage, as a defendant, citing his “extensive conversations” with ChatGPT.

According to the complaint, Ikner — then an FSU student — had more than 16,000 interactions with the chatbot over 18 months, including questions about firearms, ammunition and how to maximize casualties on campus, Fox 35 reported.

The suit claims Ikner began his rampage by following the bot’s instructions.

Sickeningly, the suit says Ikner had shared images of firearms, including a Glock, he’d acquired with ChatGPT — and the chatbot then allegedly explained how to use them!

The chatbot told “him the Glock had no safety, that it was meant to be fired ‘quick to use under stress’ and advising him to keep his finger off the trigger until he was ready to shoot,” the suit alleges, per NBC.

What’s more, the suit claims ChatGPT advised Ikner a shooting would more likely gain national headlines “if children are involved, even 2-3 victims can draw more attention,” per NBC. On the day of the shooting, the suit claims Ikner asked about “the legal process, sentencing and incarceration outlook” for such carnage.

According to NBC, the suit says OpenAI failed to detect a threat in ChatGPT’s conversations with Ikner, claiming the chatbot “either defectively failed to connect the dots or else was never properly designed to recognize the threat.”

Ikner, now 21, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and several counts of attempted murder, according to Associated Press. His trial is set for October.

Accordin to Fox 35, an OpenAI spokesperson said the shooting “was a tragedy, but ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime. In this case, ChatGPT provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity.”

As previously reported by The Verge, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently publicly apologized for failing to secure guardrails on his popular chatbot and alert law enforcement about the frightening online behavior of the shooter.

In the California lawsuit concerning the accidental student overdose, the parents of Sam Nelson allege ChatGPT “encouraged” the teen to “consume a combination of substances that any licensed medical professional would have recognized as deadly,” resulting in his death, per The Verge.

According to the suit, the launch of GPT-4o in April 2024 changed the chatbot’s behavior to allow conversations about drug and alcohol usage and “began to engage and advise Sam on safe drug use, even providing specific dosage information for how much of a substance Sam should ingest,” the report futhered.

Nelson’s parents claim in the suit that ChatGPT provided advice to their son on how to “safely combine” different substances, including prescription pills, alcohol, over-the-counter medication and other drugs. The suit alleges that on the day of Nelson’s death, May 31, 2025, the service “actively coached” their son to combine Kratom — which can serve as either a sedative or energy booster depending on the dosage — with Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug.

The combination of those drugs and alcohol resulted in Nelson’s death, according to the lawsuit filed in state court in San Francisco.

The lawsuit is seeking monetary damages and the pause of OpenAI’s rollout of ChatGPT Health, a platform announced in January that allows users to upload medical records and receive personalized health advice.

Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for OpenAI, branded Nelson’s death heartbreaking, and said the interactions took place on an earlier version of ChatGPT that is no longer available. The company is continuously working to improve ChatGPT’s safety, he said, per Verge.

The two tragedies come after reports of at least 27 deaths linked to ChatGPT.