ChatGPT Was Alleged to Have Reinforced Pittsburgh Man's Stalking and Threats Against Women

May 1, 2025

The Department of Justice alleged that Brett Michael Dadig utilized an AI chatbot from May to November 2025, employing it during acts of stalking, threatening, doxxing, and intimidating 11 women. The charges detailed the chatbot as a 'therapist' and 'best friend,' claiming it reinforced his harmful behavior. Dadig was indicted in December 2025 and pleaded guilty in March 2026.

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Alleged deployer
brett-michael-dadig, openai
Alleged developer
openai, chatbot-developers, large-language-model-developers
Alleged harmed parties
women, women-targeted-by-stalking, stalking-victims, victims-of-interstate-threats, privacy

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1506

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

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