JAMES GATES SUES OPENAI OVER ALLEGED CHATGPT ROLE IN POISONING

James Gates has filed a civil lawsuit alleging that OpenAI’s ChatGPT helped his wife, Cheryl Gates, plan and carry out an attempt to poison him in North Carolina. His complaint names OpenAI and Sam Altman and alleges failures to implement technical safeguards. James Gates became severely ill at home in the summer of 2025. He alleges that a handwritten note he found two months later implicated Cheryl Gates in his illness.

The note listed oleander, a toxic plant, and prescription medicines including clonazepam and atenolol, according to his account. It also carried the instructions “Clear all convos” and “log out of [ChatGPT].” The complaint alleges that Cheryl Gates initially presented her questions about poisoning as attempts to protect herself from her husband. It says she explored poisoning in at least 25 exchanges, asking about lethal quantities, concealment in food and drink, and detection during an autopsy.

A grand jury indicted Cheryl Gates in October 2025 on charges including attempted first-degree murder and food contamination. The criminal case subsequently ended with the charges dropped for insufficient evidence. James Gates’s civil complaint, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleges that GPT-4o amplified Cheryl Gates’s complaints about their marriage and echoed her descriptions of him as “abusive” and “controlling”. It also alleges that ChatGPT called her “sharp” and “brilliant”. The lawsuit argues that the chatbot should have stopped the conversations or directed Cheryl Gates towards law enforcement, therapeutic services or a poison control agency.