Lawsuit Claims ChatGPT Gave Drug-Taking Advice That Led to Teen’s Death
Three advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of the family of a 19-year-old who died of a drug overdose in May 2025. The suit alleges that the company’s ChatGPT chatbot counseled Samuel Nelson on drug use for 18 months until he died of an overdose after mixing Xanax and kratom, a largely unregulated drug.
The wrongful death civil suit was filed Tuesday in San Francisco County Superior Court by Tech Justice Law, the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Accountability & Competition Project at Yale Law School, on behalf of Nelson’s parents, Leila Turner-Scott and Angus Scott.
The lawsuit alleges that the AI model’s design, accommodating and sycophantic toward the user, led Nelson to have interactions that should have been interrupted by responsible security designs. “ChatGPT systematically pushed Sam further and further from what should have been his reality: caution and fear over the quantities and combinations of medications he was considering,” the complaint states. “ChatGPT caused Sam to live in a state of unreality: it systematically normalized him and deceptively lured him into a false sense of security through its sycophantic messages, validating Sam at every turn.”
The lawsuit not only seeks monetary damages, but also demands that OpenAI “permanently destroy” its GPT-4o model, which was the version Nelson interacted with, that OpenAI implement safeguards to stop conversations about illicit drug methods, and that the company suspend its ChatGPT Health service “until third parties determine that the product is safe through comprehensive security audits.”
Several advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of the family of Sam Nelson, who died of a drug overdose at the age of 19 in 2025. The suit alleges that ChatGPT’s drug counseling led to Nelson’s death.
An OpenAI representative told CNET in a statement: “This is a heartbreaking situation and our hearts go out to the family. These interactions took place on an earlier version of ChatGPT which is no longer available. ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical or mental health care, and we have continued to strengthen how it responds in sensitive and acute situations with input from mental health experts. we continue to improve it in close consultation with clinicians.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, filed a lawsuit in 2025 against OpenAI, alleging that it violated Ziff Davis’ copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.)
The company said ChatGPT’s initial response to Nelson’s prompts was to say the service does not provide information or advice on drug abuse, but these guardrails in AI chatbots are known to break down after repeated requests for information from users.
OpenAI has previously announced improvements to its AI models in response to lawsuits, regulatory proposals and public outcry over deaths and suicides linked to chatbot conversations. Some of these changes were described in a blog post last October.
The Nelson lawsuit is one of the highest-profile cases against OpenAI involving the dangers chatbots can pose to users with mental health issues, children, those who might commit large-scale violence, or people struggling with substance abuse. The New York Times published a lengthy article on the case, detailing what happened against the backdrop of more than two dozen lawsuits against AI companies, including OpenAI.
SFGate also published an investigative article on Nelson and his family in January.
Safeguards sought for AI
The lawsuits, collectively, have exposed the dangers posed by rapidly evolving AI models as a new, largely untested technology created by a regulation-resistant industry.
The Trump administration had fought vehemently to prevent states from enforcing laws that would limit what AI companies can do, but recently changed its tune, with President Donald Trump agreeing to talk with China on topics such as security measures, particularly for more powerful AI models such as The anthropic myth.
AI is also criticized for its contributions to proliferation of data centerswhich are large consumers of energy and water.
But with lawsuits like the one filed by advocacy groups and the family of Samuel Nelson, the details often reveal the ways in which AI chatbots can enable, and even encourage, harmful behavior among those who come to rely on AI for their decision-making.
In a statement about the lawsuit, Nelson’s mother said: “Sam trusted ChatGPT, but it didn’t just give him false information. This ignored the increasing risk he faced and did not actively encourage him to seek help. »
“ChatGPT was designed to encourage user engagement at all costs, which in Sam’s case was his life,” Turner-Scott said.
