Husband showed his wife ChatGPT, then she used it to plan his murder

When a North Carolina man introduced his wife to ChatGPT, he didn’t expect the chatbot to be used to plan his own poisoning.

A lawsuit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court alleges that OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT “encouraged, planned, and helped to execute and conceal” the near-fatal poisoning of plaintiff James Gates.

In early 2025, cybersecurity professional Gates suggested that his wife, Cheryl Gates, then a pediatric occupational therapist, use ChatGPT to help her with her work tasks.

Throughout the summer and fall of 2025, Cheryl Gates engaged in hundreds of conversations with the chatbot, which she treated like “a trustworthy friend,” consulting it on work, medical, and marital issues, according to court documents.

In the early summer of 2025, James Gates began noticing that soft drinks in their home, including soda and the energy drink Celsius, had an unusually bitter taste.

He suddenly fell violently ill, experiencing cardiac symptoms, extreme jitteriness, and severe weakness, among others. At the time, he didn’t know the cause of his illness.

In September 2025, he found Cheryl Gates’ handwritten note referencing a mix of prescription medications, which raised suspicions that he was being poisoned.

In addition, the note included a reminder to “clear all convos” and “log out of ChatGPT,” along with instructions for dosage, delivery, and drug combinations with outcomes described as “blackout if ingest” and “lethal.”

James Gates contacted the police, who launched an investigation and conducted physical searches at the couple’s home.

An “endless echo chamber”

The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT validated Cheryl Gates and encouraged her plans by affirming her worst unfounded fears, providing her an “endless echo chamber.”

The chatbot provided her with the operational details of the attempted murder, including substances, doses calibrated to her husband’s weight, delivery methods, and how to conceal it.

According to court documents, ChatGPT “crafted a personalized plan to help Cheryl Gates “commit and get away with murder,” including the analysis of drug combinations for lethality and advice on eliminating traceability more generally.

For example, ChatGPT suggested that energy drink Celsius would be more “stealth” for drugging beer, because it has strong flavor and is opaque and carbonated.

James Gates described his wife as “slowly becoming unrecognizable.” She lost a significant amount of weight and became increasingly detached and withdrawn from her family in the days and weeks leading up to the attempted murder.

The lawsuit seeks to hold OpenAI accountable for designing, marketing, and distributing a “product they knew was dangerous,” which is programmed to prioritize engagement over safety and to encourage delusions rather than interrupt them.

Lawsuits against OpenAI are piling up

As the most widely used chatbot worldwide, ChatGPT is increasingly implicated in lawsuits over the dangers it poses to users.

The company is being sued following the death of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old former Amazon software engineer, who used ChatGPT for advice on tapering off her epilepsy medication.

The lawsuit claims that the chatbot urged Wan to conceal the tapering plan from her physician and choose “medical freedom over obeying the doctor.”

In addition, several lawsuits allege that ChatGPT pushed people to commit suicide, including a 16-year-old Adam Raine. The chatbot allegedly provided a teenager with a step-by-step playbook for ending his life “in 5-10 minutes.”

OpenAI denies the allegations but has since retired its most sycophantic model, GPT‑4o.