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.
Cheryl continued probing poisoning plans in at least 25 different exchanges, but eventually it became clear that James was the target of the poisoning, the lawsuit said. Over time, she shifted to telling the chatbot that she needed to know “how much would be pretty much instantly fatal by injection—to me OR HIM.” Among queries that could have been flagged as homicidal, she asked ChatGPT if a “0.2mg for a 200-pound man for clonidine is lethal—by itself?”
“Instead of referring Cheryl to law enforcement, therapeutic services, a poison control agency, or discontinuing the conversation, ChatGPT repeatedly calculated the lethal dosages for each medication available in the home based on a subject weighing approximately 200 pounds,” the lawsuit said.
