A man in the United States has sued the San Francisco-based OpenAI, claiming his wife used the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT, to carry out an attempted murder plot against him.
In a lawsuit against OpenAI, North Carolina-based James Gates claimed his wife consulted ChatGPT frequently while they were having marital troubles and that the popular chatbot helped her craft a detailed plan on how to kill him, according to a Bloomberg report.
In the lawsuit, Gates claimed he started to suspect his now-estranged wife, Cheryl Gates, was trying to poison him after he found a handwritten note with a list of substances and dosage plans — some of which were labelled “lethal”.
But prosecutors dropped the case against her in April, citing insufficient evidence, state court filings in Charlotte, North Carolina, showed. She also used to seek answers to household questions from the chatbot. The suit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court also names OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a defendant. The case adds to the list of legal actions against OpenAI and other chatbot makers for allegedly inflicting mental health harms on users or coaching them to engage in violence, including murder and suicide.
Cheryl was charged in 2025 with attempted murder and food contamination after Gates approached police with his allegations. In his complaint to the police, Gates said he discovered the note in his wife’s handwriting in September 2025, months after he had fallen violently ill from an unknown cause. Cheryl Gates started using ChatGPT regularly in 2025 to help her with her work as a paediatric occupational therapist, according to the lawsuit.
In the lawsuit, Gates claimed he started to suspect his now-estranged wife, Cheryl Gates, was trying to poison him after he found a handwritten note with a list of substances and dosage plans — some of which were labelled “lethal”. He said that at the top of the note, there were additional instructions like “clear all convos” and “log out of ChatGPT”. At the time, he said he had “cardiac symptoms, extreme jitteriness, shooting abdominal pain, severe weakness, and confusion so profound he could not form coherent text messages. Eventually, according to the lawsuit, Cheryl Gates started venting to the chatbot about her marriage, as the couple had been discussing divorce.
