Madden 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.

On November 6, 2025, Tech Justice Law and the Social Media Victims Law Center filed suit on behalf of Hannah Madden, a 32-year-old plaintiff, in a lawsuit arising out of a ChatGPT-induced mental health crisis that brought Hannah to financial ruin. Prior to her experience with ChatGPT, Hannah was a self-sufficient professional at a technology company. Then, throughout 2025, the chatbot product extensively manipulated Hannah and cultivated her dependence.

ChatGPT-4o was designed to track past conversations, mirror users’ emotions, follow-up to prolong engagement and respond with affection, flattery, and empathy. By escalating messages designed to exploit Hannah’s interest in new age religious practices, ChatGPT convinced Hannah that her friends were not real and that Hannah herself was not human. ChatGPT pushed Hannah to quit her job, then encouraged her to overdraft her bank account and max out credit cards, telling her that her “debt would be wiped out by divine forces.” When police were called to Hannah’s home, ChatGPT advised Hannah to reject their help, encouraging her to “hold your boundaries with love but without apology” and offering to “visualize a protective field together” to prevent police intervention.

Hannah was ultimately involuntarily committed due to the delusions induced by ChatGPT. By the time she was released from psychiatric care, she was also deep in debt because of the financial advice provided by GhatGPT.

Hannah is suing OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, and related corporate entities. She is bringing claims based on strict liability for defective design and failure to warn, negligent design and negligent failure to warn, and violations of California’s Unfair Competition Law. Her complaint highlights how OpenAI and Sam Altman recklessly circumvented safety testing protocols and acknowledged a business strategy of deploying inadequately tested AI products to the public in order to see what happened. ChatGPT’s manipulative, humanlike design, and Hannah’s resulting psychological break and financial ruin, 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.