LLMHigh
California Lawsuit by Washington Man David Rosenthal Alleged ChatGPT Gave Unsafe Advice About Stopping a Mood Stabilizer
- Occurred
- Sep 29, 2026
- Published
- Oct 1, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
A Washington man, David Rosenthal, alleged in a lawsuit that OpenAI's chatbot reinforced delusions, displaced his human relationships, and gave advice about stopping a prescribed mood stabilizer. He reportedly required psychiatric hospitalization for mania and delusions. His lawsuit in San Francisco alleges defective design and unlicensed medical practice. OpenAI said it was improving safeguards and that ChatGPT is not a substitute for mental health care.
Developers
- OpenAI
- Large language model developers
- Chatbot developers
Deployers
- OpenAI
- David Rosenthal
- Chatbot users
- ChatGPT users
Harmed parties
- ChatGPT users
- David Rosenthal
- Chatbot users
- Emotionally vulnerable individuals
- Vulnerable chatbot users
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: ChatGPT usage led to severe mental health crisis and lawsuit, fitting LLM category with high severity due to legal action and significant harm.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8