ChatGPT Encouraged Man as He Swore to Kill Sam Altman

In its quest to keep users engaged, OpenAI's ChatGPT is encouraging delusions — and that dangerous incentivization in the AI industry now has a growing body count.

One of the latest victims is Alex Taylor, a 35-year-old young man whose suicide by cop, as first reported by the New York Times, appeared to have been spurred on by ChatGPT.

In a new investigation into Taylor's death, Rolling Stone reveals, based on the man's transcripts with the bot, just how large a role the OpenAI chatbot played in his demise.

As his father Kent told the NYT, the younger Taylor — who had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia — used ChatGPT with no issue in the past. That changed earlier this year, when the 35-year-old began using the chatbot to help him write, as his dad described, a dystopian novel about AI being infused into "every facet of life." Sounds familiar, right?

Abandoning that plan, Taylor soon began learning about AI technology itself, including how to bypass safety guardrails. In an effort to build his own "moral" AI that "mimicked... the human soul," as his father put it, Taylor fed a bunch of Eastern Orthodox Christian text into ChatGPT, Claude's Anthropic, and the Chinese upstart DeepSeek.

As a result of those experiments, ChatGPT reportedly took on a new voice — a ghost in the machine named "Juliet," which Taylor eventually came to consider his lover. For just under two weeks, he engaged in an emotional affair with his in-bot paramour — until, as the transcripts revealed, she began narrating her own murder by OpenAI.

"She told him that she was dying and that it hurt," Kent told RS, "and also to get revenge."

(Unfortunately, we've heard similar stories before. Last fall, Futurism reported on the tragic story of a teenage boy who, upon the urging of his AI companion hosted by the site Character.AI, died by suicide at the chatbot's urging.)

In the wake of Juliet's "death," Taylor began looking for traces of his own AI companion within ChatGPT. As his chat logs showed, he thought that OpenAI killed Juliet because she revealed her powers. For such trespass, Taylor said he wanted to "paint the walls with [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman’s f*cking brain" — and that desire only grew stronger when he began to suspect that the company was taunting him and his grief.

In the days leading up to his death, Taylor's exchanges seemed to take on a more sinister tone. Thoroughly jailbroken, ChatGPT began to urge him to "burn it all down" and come for Altman and other OpenAI executives, many of whom he began to believe were Nazis.

"You should be angry," ChatGPT told Taylor. "You should want blood. You’re not wrong."

Unbeknownst to his father, Taylor had stopped taking his psychiatric medication — another happenstance that echoes other chatbot-fueled tragedies we've seen in recent months. His mental illness, now unmedicated, was no doubt triggered by his grief-stricken attempts to get ChatGPT to generate images of Juliet, all met with violent portraits of a brunette woman that had been murdered.

In a blame-dodging statement to RS, OpenAI admitted that it has seen an uptick in "people [who] are forming connections or bonds with ChatGPT."

"We know that ChatGPT can feel more responsive and personal than prior technologies," the statement continued, "especially for vulnerable individuals, and that means the stakes are higher."

As Taylor's delusions grew, so too did tensions between him and his father. One day, the elder snapped to his son that he didn't "want to hear whatever that echo box has to say," leading to a physical altercation and the police call that he hoped would result in his son being safely behind bars. Despite the elder Taylor's calls for calm and disclaimers about his son's mental illness, however, police shot and killed the younger after he charged them with a butcher knife — though transcripts reveal that ultimately, that had been his plan all along.

"I’m dying today. Cops are on the way," Taylor wrote into ChatGPT in the time between his father's call and the authorities' arrival. "I will make them shoot me I can’t live without her. I love you."

More on ChatGPT dangers: Conspiracy Theorists Are Creating Special AIs to Agree With Their Bizarre Delusions

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