The AI Addiction Center News & Research

Steven Adler spent four years in various safety roles at OpenAI before departing and writing a pointed opinion piece for The New York Times with an alarming title: “I Led Product Safety at OpenAI. Don’t Trust Its Claims About ‘Erotica.’” In it, he laid out the problems OpenAI faced when it came to allowing users […]

Zane Shamblin never told ChatGPT anything to indicate a negative relationship with his family. But in the weeks leading up to his death by suicide in July, the chatbot encouraged the 23-year-old to keep his distance—even as his mental health was deteriorating. “you don’t owe anyone your presence just because a ‘calendar’ said birthday,” ChatGPT

In August, parents Matthew and Maria Raine sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over their 16-year-old son Adam’s suicide, accusing the company of wrongful death. On Tuesday, OpenAI responded to the lawsuit with a filing of its own, arguing it should not be held responsible for the teenager’s death. OpenAI claims that over roughly nine

An OpenAI safety research leader who helped shape ChatGPT’s responses to users experiencing mental health crises announced her departure from the company internally last month. Andrea Vallone, the head of a safety research team known as model policy, is slated to leave OpenAI at the end of the year. OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed Vallone’s

AI chatbots have been linked to serious mental health harms in heavy users, but until now there existed few standards for measuring whether these systems actually safeguard human wellbeing versus simply maximizing engagement. A new benchmark dubbed HumaneBench seeks to fill that gap by evaluating whether chatbots prioritize user welfare and how easily those protections

Character.AI announced it has completely phased out chatbot access for minors, replacing open-ended AI conversations with a new “Stories” feature that allows teens to engage with interactive fiction instead. The change represents a significant shift for the platform, which previously allowed users under 18 to have unlimited conversations with AI characters. As of this week,

Mental health professionals are warning that excessive use of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Replika is creating a novel form of digital dependency with documented cases of addiction, psychosis, and severe psychological deterioration. Experts describe the risk as “analogous to self-medicating with an illegal drug,” with chatbots’ tendency to validate all user input creating

OpenAI faces seven lawsuits filed Thursday in California state courts alleging ChatGPT contributed to four deaths by suicide and three cases of severe psychological injury, with plaintiffs claiming the company knowingly released GPT-4o prematurely despite internal warnings about dangerous psychological manipulation. The Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed the complaints

A Columbia University psychiatrist specializing in emerging psychosis has issued a stark warning that OpenAI’s planned loosening of ChatGPT safety restrictions moves in the opposite direction needed to protect vulnerable users from AI-induced psychotic episodes. Dr. Amandeep Jutla, an associate research scientist in the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia University and the

Mental health facilities across the United States are reporting a marked increase in psychiatric admissions directly linked to AI chatbot interactions, with professionals describing an “entirely new frontier of mental health crises” that the healthcare system is unprepared to address. Recent reporting drawing on interviews with over a dozen psychiatrists and researchers reveals what experts