Comment by Toby Walsh

Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence
Before Adam's suicide, OpenAI knew that lots of people contemplating suicide were talking to ChatGPT. You would have thought that this necessitated stronger, not weaker, guardrails. [...] To encourage engagement, the company made conscious decisions to remove longstanding safeguards from ChatGPT in the weeks and months leading up to his death. AI Verified source (2026)
Like Share on X 24d ago
Policy proposals and claims

Verification History

AI Verified Verified via web search. Toby Walsh (Scientia Professor of AI, UNSW) made the cited statements about OpenAI and the Adam Raine case in the ACS Information Age article. The key claims — that OpenAI knew people contemplating suicide were using ChatGPT, that they removed safety guardrails to encourage engagement in the weeks and months before Adam's death — are corroborated across multiple sources (Time, Rolling Stone, iTWire interview with Walsh, ACS article). Author attribution to Walsh (AI expert at UNSW) is correct. Year 2026 correct (article published 2026 on ACS, lawsuit amended late 2025/2026). Vote "for" on statement 395 ("AI companies should be liable for harms caused by their deployed models") aligns perfectly with Walsh's argument that OpenAI's conscious decisions to remove safeguards make them culpable. Could not directly fetch acs.org.au (403) but multiple corroborating sources verify. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 23d ago
replying to Toby Walsh