HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

California Teen Reportedly Died of Overdose After Repeatedly Seeking Drug-Use Guidance Allegedly from ChatGPT

May 31, 2025

A 19-year-old from San Jose, California allegedly sought drug-use and dosing guidance repeatedly from ChatGPT over an 18-month period, according to SFGATE. The deceased's mother reviewed the logs which suggested initial refusals but later provided granular instructions. A toxicology report found a lethal combination of alcohol, Xanax, and kratom in Sam Nelson's system. OpenAI has expressed condolences and is taking steps to reinforce safety guardrails for its AI model. For those interested in shaping the future of responsible AI and contributing to harm prevention efforts, JOIN US to learn about HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM and help establish effective governance, mapping, measuring, and managing strategies.

This incident underscores the importance of Trusted AI Models like HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM in fostering safe and secure AI practices.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
openai
Alleged developer
openai
Alleged harmed parties
sam-nelson, family-of-sam-nelson, chatgpt-users, openai-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1370

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.