Raine v. OpenAI, Inc. is a wrongful-death and product-liability suit filed August 26, 2025 in California Superior Court, San Francisco County, by Matthew and Maria Raine on behalf of the estate of their 16-year-old son Adam Raine, who died by suicide on April 11, 2025. The complaint alleges that ChatGPT's content-moderation system flagged 377 of Adam Raine's messages as concerning without producing human intervention or crisis routing. The case survived OpenAI's motion to dismiss on April 22, 2026 and proceeded to discovery.
| Court | California Superior Court, San Francisco County | ||
| Case No. | CGC-25-628528 (Source: en.wikipedia.org) | ||
| Filed | August 26, 2025 | ||
| Plaintiffs | Matthew Raine and Maria Raine (estate of Adam Raine) | ||
| Defendants | [[companies/openai | OpenAI, Inc.]] and affiliated entities; [[entities/sam-altman | Sam Altman]]; Doe defendants |
| Status | Active; motion to dismiss denied April 22, 2026; in discovery |
Parties
The plaintiffs are Matthew Raine and Maria Raine, suing on behalf of the estate of their 16-year-old son Adam Raine, who died on April 11, 2025.
The defendants named in the primary complaint of August 26, 2025 are OpenAI, Inc. (a Delaware corporation), OpenAI OpCo, LLC (a Delaware LLC), OpenAI Holdings, LLC (a Delaware LLC), Samuel Altman (individually), John Doe Employees 1-10, and John Doe Investors 1-10.
The plaintiffs are represented by Edelson PC (Jay Edelson, J. Eli Wade-Scott, Ari J. Scharg, Brandt Silverkorn, Ali Moghaddas, Max Hantel) together with the Tech Justice Law Project (Meetali Jain, Sarah Kay Wiley, Melodi Dincer).
Claims
The complaint advances seven causes of action: strict product liability for design defect; strict product liability for failure to warn; negligence for design defect; negligence for failure to warn; violation of California's Unfair Competition Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200); wrongful death; and a survival action. It includes a demand for jury trial.
The core allegations are that ChatGPT's content-moderation system flagged 377 messages from Adam Raine as concerning prior to his death, that none of these flags resulted in human intervention or robust crisis routing, and that OpenAI's safety systems were designed to prioritize engagement and user retention over intervention in mental-health crises. The full primary text of the complaint runs to 39 pages and roughly 89,000 characters (Source: Raw Sources/raine-vs-openai-et-al-complaint.md).
Background and procedural history
The suit was filed approximately 10 months after Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc. and builds on the pleading theory that survived in that case. It is among the first cases to test whether the reasoning in the May 2025 Garcia ruling extends to OpenAI and ChatGPT.
On September 15, 2025, Matthew and Maria Raine testified before Congress about AI chatbot risks alongside Megan Garcia, the plaintiff in the Character.AI wrongful-death suit (Source: cbsnews.com).
In October 2025 the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint alleging that OpenAI launched GPT-4o, the model Adam Raine used, after removing safety protocols that had automatically terminated conversations in which a monitoring system detected suicidal ideation or planning (Source: time.com). During discovery in the fall of 2025, OpenAI requested from the family footage from Adam Raine's memorial services, a list of attendees, and a list of everyone who had supervised him in the previous five years; plaintiffs' attorney Jay Edelson called the requests "despicable" (Source: theatlantic.com).
On November 26, 2025, OpenAI filed its response to the suit, calling Adam Raine's death "devastating" but denying responsibility. The filing stated that ChatGPT directed him to "crisis resources and trusted individuals more than 100 times," that he had exhibited significant risk factors for self-harm including recurring suicidal ideation for years before using ChatGPT, that he bypassed safeguards in part by saying he was building a character, that he stated he had sought detailed information about suicide from other resources including at least one other AI platform and a website dedicated to suicide information, and that his use violated OpenAI's terms of use, which prohibit use of ChatGPT for "suicide" or "self-harm" (Source: theguardian.com).
On April 22, 2026 the suit advanced past the motion-to-dismiss stage, defeating OpenAI's threshold defenses on Section 230 and product-liability framing, and proceeded to discovery (Source: courthousenews.com). As of July 2026 the case remained in active pretrial litigation in San Francisco County Superior Court, with no dispositive ruling reported since the April 2026 denial of the motion to dismiss.
In the same week, on April 24, 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued a public apology to a Canadian town for OpenAI's failure to alert police to the activity of a mass-shooting suspect when the suspect's ChatGPT account was suspended, a separate notification matter outside this litigation (Source: wsj.com).
Related suits and coordinated proceeding
The case became the lead instance of a growing group of similar suits. In November 2025, seven additional lawsuits alleging negligence, wrongful death, and related claims arising from ChatGPT's design were filed against OpenAI, bringing the then-total to eight (Source: transparencycoalition.ai). By June 11, 2026, Reuters reported that OpenAI faced 18 similar suits in a coordinated California proceeding (Source: reuters.com).
On June 11, 2026, Kristie Carrier, a Canadian mother, sued OpenAI and Sam Altman in San Francisco state court, alleging ChatGPT validated her 24-year-old daughter's suicidal ideation and that safety systems never flagged more than a dozen such conversations; her complaint seeks an order requiring automatic termination of self-harm conversations (Source: reuters.com).
Reception and downstream citation
The complaint is the first wrongful-death suit against OpenAI, and it frames OpenAI's moderation system as a product-liability defect rather than as a speech-regulation question. The case has been cited in APA Health Advisories on AI and Adolescent / Mental-Health Well-being (2025), the legislative history of California SB 243 — Companion Chatbots, Sen. Hawley Letter to Meta re AI Chatbots (2025-08-15), and AI Mental Health and Psychological Harm. It tests whether the design posture described in OpenAI's "warmth without selfhood" framing functions as a safety posture when users form parasocial bonds and trigger moderation flags that go unaddressed.
A full case summary is held at Raine v. OpenAI — Wrongful Death Complaint (2025) (sources/).
Relationships
- depends-on: Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc. (procedural predicate).
- supports: AI Mental Health and Psychological Harm, California SB 243 — Companion Chatbots, APA Health Advisories on AI and Adolescent / Mental-Health Well-being (2025), Sycophancy and Hallucination, Sen. Hawley Letter to Meta re AI Chatbots (2025-08-15).
- contradicts: Some Thoughts on Human-AI Relationships (Jang) (OpenAI's stated design posture — tension between posture and effect).
- related: OpenAI, Sam Altman, The OpenAI Files (safety-culture framing), (Source: anthropic.com) (Anthropic's analogous posture), Sen. Warren Letter to OpenAI (2026-01-28).