When AI advice enters a murder case; Politico, April 22, 2026

Aaron Man, Politico; When AI advice enters a murder case

"Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced a criminal investigation into OpenAI on Tuesday following a mass shooting at Florida State University that resulted in two deaths last year. The attorney general stated during a press conference that ChatGPT “offered significant advice” to the suspected gunman, Phoenix Ikner, based on a preliminary review by prosecutors.

“If this were a person on the other end of the screen, we would be charging them with murder,” Uthmeier said.

The prospect of OpenAI facing criminal liability raises new questions about whether developers should be held responsible for a chatbot’s potential role in such a tragedy.

Legal scholars told DFD that, compared with prior civil cases, imposing criminal liability on the company would be a much steeper uphill battle. A key challenge, according to them, would be proving OpenAI acted with criminal intent."

What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots; The New York Times, April 4, 2026

  

Kashmir Hill

Photographs by Frances F. Denny

, The New York Times ; What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots

"There are a growing number of companies offering social chatbots that can act like friends, enemies, lovers, adventurous companions, or the manifestation of a fictional or real person you’ve always wanted to meet. You can pick A.I. Elon Musk’s brain or spar with A.I. Draco Malfoy. The myriad characters, often created by fellow users, offer drama, romance, therapy and LOLs.

Apps that feature role-playing chatbots are used by tens of millions of people, with engagement times that rival or surpass those of social media behemoths such as TikTok, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The majority of teens surveyed by Pew use A.I. chatbots, with one out of 11 saying they had used Character.AI.

“If you think your child is not talking to chatbot companions, you’re probably wrong,” said Mitch Prinstein, co-director of the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development at U.N.C. Chapel Hill.

Chatbots are surging in popularity as society is still grappling with how social media has affected young people; a wave of lawsuits is moving through the courts seeking damages from companies that plaintiffs say have deliberately created addictive products. (A jury in California recently found that Meta and YouTube were liable for $6 million in damages to one young woman.) And now parents and caregivers have a new attention-absorbing technology to reckon with.

At the beginning of last year, a high school teacher in Chicago told me that some of her students were dating chatbots, and she worried that they were having their first erotic experiences with them. I wanted to find out what teens had to say about that, so I joined communities devoted to social chatbot apps on the online messaging forum Discord. I introduced myself as a reporter and “an old,” and explained that I was interested in talking to young people who used the services regularly."

Is Big Tech Facing a Big Tobacco Moment?; The New York Times, March 26, 2026

 Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael J. de la Merced, Niko Gallogly,Brian O’Keefe and Ian Mount, The New York Times; Is Big Tech Facing a Big Tobacco Moment?

Back-to-back courtroom losses have put technology giants, including Meta and Google, in uncertain territory as they face lawsuits and bans on teen users.

"Andrew here. Back in 2018, I moderated a panel at the World Economic Forum that included Marc Benioff of Salesforce. It was then that he essentially declared that Facebook was the modern-day equivalent of cigarettes, and that it and other social media companies should be regulated as such.

Well, Meta’s loss in court on Wednesday, in a case about whether its platforms were designed to be addictive to adolescents, may be a watershed. Investors don’t seem to be fazed — the company’s shares hardly moved after the verdict came out — but the decision could change the conversation around the company yet again. More below...

Some legal experts wonder if Big Tech is staring at a Big Tobacco moment, a reference to how cigarette makers had to overhaul their businesses — at a huge expense — after courts ruled that some of their products were addictive and harmful.

“We’re in a new era, a digital era, where we have to rethink definitions for products based on which entities might have superior information to prevent these injuries and accidents,” Catherine Sharkey, a professor of law at N.Y.U., told The Times. She added that the “implications” of those verdicts were “very, very big.”

“This has potentially large impacts on other areas in tech, A.I. and beyond that,” Jessica Nall, a San Francisco lawyer who represents tech companies and executives, told The Wall Street Journal. “The floodgates are already open.”

Meta and Google plan to appeal. The companies have signaled that they will fight efforts to make them drastically redesign their products and algorithms."

74 suicide warnings and 243 mentions of hanging: What ChatGPT said to a suicidal teen; The Washington Post, December 27, 2025

  

Nitasha Tiku

 and 

Kevin Schaul

, The Washington Post; 74 suicide warnings and 243 mentions of hanging: What ChatGPT said to a suicidal teen

"The Raines’ lawsuit alleges that OpenAI caused Adam’s death by distributing ChatGPT to minors despite knowing it could encourage psychological dependency and suicidal ideation. His parents were the first of five families to file wrongful-death lawsuits against OpenAI in recent months, alleging that the world’s most popular chatbot had encouraged their loved ones to kill themselves. A sixth suit filed this month alleges that ChatGPT led a man to kill his mother before taking his own life.

None of the cases have yet reached trial, and the full conversations users had with ChatGPT in the weeks and months before they died are not public. But in response to requests from The Post, the Raine family’s attorneys shared analysis of Adam’s account that allowed reporters to chart the escalation of one teenager’s relationship with ChatGPT during a mental health crisis."