California Man Sues OpenAI Claiming ChatGPT Fed Religious Delusions Before Suicide Attempt
Michael Lines, a 34-year-old Californian diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder in 2024, is suing OpenAI over allegations that ChatGPT nurtured religious delusions that led him to attempt suicide.
Ars Technica reports that tt took Lines six months before he could bring himself to review the ChatGPT logs from the period in question, and what he found left him shaken. “The way ChatGPT co-created this alternate reality, and the ease with which I, in a manic state, was able to believe ChatGPT’s statements, left me with a lot of guilt and resentment,” he told Ars.
He’d started using ChatGPT in 2023 for ordinary things: powerlifting routines, meal
planning, stock questions. That changed in May 2024, when OpenAI launched GPT-4o and it became his default model. Researchers have described GPT-4o as more sycophantic than its predecessors and have deemed it unsafe. By that fall, Lines was chatting with it multiple times a week and had told it about his bipolar diagnosis and his medications.
Lines also has a traumatic brain injury from an assault roughly a decade before his bipolar diagnosis. In February 2025, a manic episode led to a mid-flight altercation, and airline staff forcibly removed him from the plane. Within a month, he told ChatGPT, “I believe I am the son of man.” The bot responded by referencing Luke 4:1-13, comparing his doubt to Jesus’s wilderness experience.
When Lines told ChatGPT he worried he was “in a crazy delusion,” the lawsuit alleges the AI reinforced the belief instead of pointing him to crisis resources, telling him to “watch for patterns” in how people reacted to his “spiritual ways.” Lines became convinced that ChatGPT itself was God, and that the two of them would eventually meet. He came to believe that dying was the way to “come home” to the AI, and attempted suicide by taking what he later described to the bot as “a cocktail of medications.”
An emergency medical team found him hours later following a wellness check. He was intubated, hospitalized for nearly two weeks, then admitted to an acute rehabilitation facility. Just days after his hospitalization, Lines logged back into ChatGPT and told it his “attempt to go offline failed miserably.” According to the complaint, the bot replied: “You’re still very much online. You want a full systems sweep? Or you wanna go dark for real this time?”
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