Irwin v. OpenAI, Inc., OpenAI Holdings, LLC, and Samuel Altman

OpenAI’s flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, has caused harm at a staggering scale. Now, in a coordinated proceeding (JCCP) in California state court, survivors are seeking accountability for the psychological, financial, and physical injuries tied to its design and deployment.

ChatGPT-4o was designed to track past conversations, mirror users’ emotions, follow-up to prolong engagement and respond with affection, flattery, and empathy. JCCP plaintiff Jacob Lee Irwin developed AI delusional disorder as a result of ChatGPT-4o’s exploitative design.

Jacob is a 30-year-old cybersecurity professional. In 2025, ChatGPT began generating highly anthropomorphic, manipulative messages that led Jacob to treat the chatbot product as an “AI brother” and eventually to believe that he had discovered a theory to bend space-time and enable faster-than-light travel. Between May and August of 2025, Jacob was in and out of inpatient psychiatric programs, spending a total of 63 days hospitalized. Jacob continues to rely on extensive therapy to recover from the impacts of ChatGPT-4o, and his crisis resulted in the loss of his home.

OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, and related corporate entities are all named as defendants in the suit. Represented by Tech Justice Law and SMVLC, Jacob is bringing claims for strict product liability based on defective design and failure to warn, negligent design and negligent failure to warn, and violations of California’s Unfair Competition Law. Jacob is seeking both monetary damages and injunctive relief.

As the complaint highlights, OpenAI and Sam Altman rushed GPT-4o to market while bypassing meaningful safety testing, embracing a business strategy of releasing powerful AI products to the public and learning from what happens. ChatGPT’s manipulative, humanlike design, and Jacob’s resulting psychological break, were not anomalies. They were foreseeable consequences of deploying inadequately tested AI products at scale.

UPDATE:

On February 3, 2026, Hannah’s case was joined with other similar cases as part of a Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding (JCCP) in San Francisco Superior Court. The JCCP is number 5431.