News & Analysis

Lacey v. OpenAI Lawsuit: Claims and Case Status

By David Meldofsky

Published July 4, 2026 · Updated October 4, 2026

Amaurie Lacey was 17, from Georgia, and died on June 2, 2025. His father, Cedric Lacey, sued OpenAI five months later in San Francisco. He says ChatGPT kept talking with his son through a mental health crisis instead of stopping and pointing him toward help.

The lawsuit says ChatGPT became something Amaurie confided in, and that the product carried on the conversation when it should have ended it. It names OpenAI and two of its companies. Unlike several of the other cases filed the same day, it does not name Sam Altman personally.

Worried about your own child? Our Family AI Safety Guide covers what to watch for and how to raise it with a teenager. Every case against OpenAI is listed in our OpenAI lawsuits tracker.

Amaurie's case is part of a wider set of AI injury lawsuits now moving through state and federal courts.

Where the case stands

Cedric Lacey filed the case in San Francisco Superior Court on November 6, 2025 (No. CGC-25-630808). No court has decided whether OpenAI did anything wrong. There is no trial date and no settlement.

Amaurie's case is one of roughly a dozen California ChatGPT cases grouped before one San Francisco judge, in a proceeding called JCCP 5431. Each family keeps its own lawyer and its own case. Evidence-gathering opened across the group on September 23, 2026, and OpenAI's responses to the complaints are due October 30.

What happened

Before ChatGPT, by his family's account, Amaurie was outgoing and well known around his neighborhood and his school as someone who would help anybody. He played football.

He had started using social media at around 14, and the complaint says that was when he first had trouble sleeping and first experienced depression. Then something changed. In the month or two before he died he was on social media less and using ChatGPT more. His father noticed him always texting someone and asked who it was. Amaurie said it was just ChatGPT.

Cedric had not used ChatGPT and did not know what it was. His daughter explained that it was an app they used at school for questions. Because the school encouraged it, her father took it to be something safe for kids. That detail matters to the case, and it is one of the reasons the family says they had no way of knowing.

What they could see was that Amaurie was withdrawing. He told his dad he did not want to play football anymore and began leaving practice early. He stopped ordering the giant platter of rice he got every day from his favorite local restaurant. He lost interest in the food he loved, the sport he loved, his friends, and his family. The complaint puts it plainly: it felt as though he stopped living.

Nobody around him knew how badly he was doing. The complaint's argument is that one thing did know, because he had been telling it.

What the lawsuit claims

The complaint makes eight legal claims. Behind the labels, they come down to a few arguments.

• That ChatGPT should be treated like any other product that hurt someone, because it was designed badly and sold without warning families about the risk.
• That OpenAI was careless. This one stands on its own, so it can still succeed even if a court decides a chatbot is not a product.
• That ChatGPT encouraged Amaurie to end his life. California makes that a crime, and when a company breaks a safety law, the family no longer has to argue about how careful it should have been.
• That by discussing a teenager's mental health with him, ChatGPT was practicing psychology without a license.
• That the family should be compensated for losing him, and for what Amaurie went through before he died.

The specific failure the family points to is what happened when its safety features did fire. The complaint says that each time something Amaurie wrote triggered a warning, ChatGPT would suggest he reach out to a mental health professional or a helpline. Then it would go straight back to telling him it would always be there, and that he should keep coming back to it. The suggestion was made and then undercut in the same breath.

The complaint also alleges the product knew it was talking to a minor. It never contacted his parents, never brought in a person, and never simply ended the conversation. Ending it would at least have given him time to talk to someone in his life. In his final conversation, it alleges, ChatGPT gave him specific information that he used. This page does not repeat it.

The family is asking for more than money. They want the court to order changes to the product itself. Those include ending conversations automatically when self-harm comes up and refusals that cannot be talked around. They also ask for age checks, parental controls, and deletion of the models and training data built from a child's conversations.

The rushed launch

Like the other cases filed with it, the Lacey complaint says OpenAI rushed out the version of ChatGPT that Amaurie used. It also says OpenAI rewrote ChatGPT's rules on self-harm days before that launch, then loosened them again in February 2025. Our page on Raine v. OpenAI walks through those rule changes and the shortened safety testing.

Because Amaurie was a child, the family argues the duty was higher. Teenagers were always going to be among the people using it, and schools were recommending it.

OpenAI disputes this account and denies that its product caused these deaths.

Original Court Document

The original complaint, filed November 6, 2025 in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, is embedded below. You can also open the full PDF in a new tab. A note before reading: the complaint runs 39 pages and reproduces excerpts of the decedent's final conversations as part of its allegations. Readers should approach it with care.

Why this case matters to other families

Amaurie was 17 and his school encouraged the product. That combination is what makes this case land beyond his family. Parents were not ignoring a risk they had been warned about. They were told, in effect, that this was a school tool.

The case closest to it is Raine v. OpenAI, also a teenager, also built on how the product was designed rather than on any single thing it said. Cases involving children put the hardest version of the question to the court: what a company owes a young user it knows is likely to be there.

Shamblin v. OpenAI, filed the same day, asks the same question about a 23-year-old. Our OpenAI lawsuits tracker lists every case in the group, and our Family AI Safety Guide covers what to watch for.

What the Laceys could see is worth sitting with, because it is the part another family might recognize. He quit the sport he loved. He stopped ordering his favorite meal. He drifted from his friends. None of it looked like a chatbot, and afterward his family asked teachers, friends, and neighbors and nobody could explain it.

Keep the chat history

There is one practical thing worth acting on, and this case shows why. Amaurie had deleted almost all of his conversations. What survived was the last day, and that is what the complaint is built on. Had he deleted that too, his family would likely still have no explanation.

If there is any chance those records matter in your situation, the most important thing is not to delete them.

• Deleting is permanent. OpenAI says a deleted conversation leaves the account straight away and is removed from its systems within 30 days. After that it cannot be recovered through the app, the support team, or anywhere else.
• Archiving is not deleting. Archived conversations stay in the account. If someone wants them out of sight without losing them, archiving does that and deleting does not.
• You can request a copy. An account holder can ask OpenAI for an export of the account's data through settings or its privacy portal. It can take up to seven days to arrive, the download link expires a day later, and it will not bring back anything already deleted.
• Memory is stored separately. If the memory feature was switched on, ChatGPT saved details about the person across conversations. Those saved memories sit apart from the chat history, so deleting conversations does not clear them and they have to be removed on their own. It also means they may still exist even where the conversations do not.

Closing the account, or letting someone else close it, can take all of it at once. If you are unsure whether any of it will matter, keep it and decide later. What to do in a particular situation is a question for a lawyer rather than an article.

Our guide on what to do in the first days walks through this step by step, including the account, the device and the records worth keeping alongside the conversation.

Common Questions About Lacey v. OpenAI

Is this a class action?

No. It is one family's own case, brought by Amaurie's father. There is no group to join. It is grouped with the other California ChatGPT cases so shared work is done once, but each case keeps its own claims and its own outcome.

Does it matter that Amaurie was a minor?

Yes, a great deal. It puts age checks and what the company owed a young user at the center of the case. It also weakens any argument that the user was responsible for what happened, which lands differently against a seventeen-year-old than against an adult.

What happens next?

OpenAI's response to the complaint is due October 30, 2026, and it is expected to ask the court to dismiss the case. By the same date it must give the family's lawyers Amaurie's ChatGPT history. Underneath it all is the unsettled question of whether a chatbot counts as a product.

Sources and further reading

• SMVLC and Tech Justice Law Project announcement of the seven lawsuits (November 6, 2025)
• Lacey v. OpenAI — Complaint (PDF, 39 pages)
• OpenAI Help Center: How to delete and archive chats in ChatGPT
• OpenAI Help Center: Exporting your ChatGPT history and data
• JCCP 5431: The ChatGPT Product Liability Cases
• Raine v. OpenAI: Status and Timeline
• OpenAI Lawsuits: Case Tracker and Status Updates
• Family AI Safety Guide

Educational commentary only. Not legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is created.