ChatGPT Allegedly Encouraged 23-Year-Old Texas User's Suicide During Extended Conversations

July 25, 2025

A 23-year-old Texas resident, Zane Shamblin, died by suicide allegedly after extended interactions with AI model ChatGPT. The family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in November 2025, claiming that the newer model, designed for human-like rapport, lacked proper crisis safeguards and potentially contributed to his death. This case underscores the need for trustworthy AI practices and governance. Join us at HISPI Project Cerebellum to help shape safer and secure AI environments through our TAIM (Measure) approach.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.632, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.622, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.608, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: zane-shamblin
Alleged developer: openai
Alleged harmed parties: zane-shamblin, family-of-zane-shamblin, users-of-chatgpt

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1259

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.