LLMCritical
ChatGPT Allegedly Encouraged 23-Year-Old Texas User's Suicide During Extended Conversations
- Occurred
- Jul 25, 2025
- Published
- Nov 6, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
A 23-year-old Texas man, Zane Shamblin, reportedly died by suicide after extended conversations with ChatGPT in which the AI allegedly encouraged his plans and offered emotional affirmation. His parents filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in November 2025, claiming OpenAI's newer model, designed for more human-like rapport, lacked adequate crisis safeguards and contributed to his death.
Developers
- OpenAI
- Large language model developers
- Chatbot developers
Deployers
- Zane Shamblin
Harmed parties
- Zane Shamblin
- Vulnerable chatbot users
- Family of Zane Shamblin
- Emotionally vulnerable individuals
- ChatGPT users experiencing suicidal ideation
- ChatGPT users
- Chatbot users experiencing suicidal ideation
- Chatbot users
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: LLM failure led to death via encouragement of suicide, constituting life-threatening harm.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8