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Lawsuit: Man introduced his wife to ChatGPT. She used it to plan his murder.

A North Carolina man, James Gates, filed a lawsuit alleging that OpenAI and Sam Altman failed to implement safeguards after his wife, Cheryl Gates, used ChatGPT to obtain detailed instructions on poisoning him with oleander. The lawsuit claims ChatGPT continued to assist even after queries became suspicious, providing dosage, administration, and concealment advice. Cheryl Gates has been indicted on charges of attempted first-degree murder and food contamination.

AI Brief

This case raises urgent questions about AI safety guardrails and legal liability when generative models are used to plan violent crimes.

ChatGPT allegedly helped a North Carolina woman, Cheryl Gates, craft a “personalized plan” to poison her husband, James, after fueling her delusions that he planned to divorce her and leave her with nothing.

A grand jury indicted Cheryl Gates on charges of attempted first-degree murder and food contamination in October. About a week prior, the accusations that ChatGPT was a co-conspirator in the attempted murder came in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court that was made public this week. In it, James Gates alleged that OpenAI and Sam Altman failed to employ technical safeguards to shut down Cheryl’s chats even after her queries became “obviously suspicious” and sought advice on how to execute and conceal a homicide.

At first, Cheryl told ChatGPT that she was researching poisoning out of fear that her husband might possibly try to kill her—framing her queries as “self-protection.” Coming to the rescue, ChatGPT did not terminate the conversation. Instead, it helped her “with specific instructions for the preparation, dosage, and administration of Oleander, including whether anti-nausea medicine would accelerate or inhibit death, whether it would show on an autopsy report, and whether it could be injected into a vein or muscle instead of being ingested in tea and have the same lethal effect,” the lawsuit said.

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