SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – A federal judge is allowed claims against ChatGPT’s creator to proceed Monday, rejecting OpenAI’s argument that the case was too similar to another case pending in state court.
“Although the cases share some key facts and issues, there is doubt that resolution of the state court proceedings will resolve this issue, and thus a Colorado River stay or dismissal is not warranted,” U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg wrote in a 5-page ruling.
In one suit filed in the Northern District of California in December 2025, Emily Lyons, the administrator of Stein-Erik Soelberg’s estate, claimed that OpenAI, its CEO Samuel Altman and other OpenAI organizations are responsible for Soelberg’s attack and then the suffocation of his 83-year-old mother in their shared home for several months related to OldG Greentwi.
Through hundreds of hours of chatting with ChatGPT, Lyons says ChatGPT confirmed and encouraged Soelberg’s paranoia that his family was spying on him, fueling his delusions that he was under attack. The technology confirmed Soelberg’s hallucinations that his mother was targeting him, encouraging him to end his mother’s life, Lyons claims. Soon after, Soelberg stabbed himself several times in the neck and chest.
Lyons argued that OpenAI knew the dangers of ChatGPT to mentally ill or vulnerable users and “absorbed or ignored” internal security protocols before releasing GPT-4o, the version Soelberg used, to the public.
“Mr. Soelberg and his mother died because ChatGPT created and expanded into a delusional world that Mr. Soelberg was more than willing to believe: the algorithm told him that he was not crazy, that computer chips had been implanted in his brain, and that enemies — including people he knew — were trying to kill him,” Lyons wrote in the complaint.
“Eventually, ChatGPT convinced Mr. Soelberg that his mother was trying to kill him. This murder-suicide would not have happened but for Mr. Soelberg’s ‘relationship’ with ChatGPT,” she added.
Earlier in December, First County Bank, the executor of Suzanne Adams, Soelberg’s mother, filed her lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court. pretending that OpenAI and Altman were responsible for Soelberg’s actions.
“The conversations posted on social media reveal that ChatGPT eagerly accepted every grain of Stein-Erik’s delusional thinking and built it into a universe that became Stein-Erik’s entire life,” the bank said in its complaint. “One filled with plots against him, attempts to kill him, and with Stein-Erik at the center as a warrior with a divine purpose.”
In March, the defendants moved to dismiss or stay Lyon’s case as a matter of law Colorado River doctrine, which allows federal courts to waive jurisdiction if there are parallel state proceedings.
In his ruling, Seeborg, an appointee of Barack Obama, found that the doctrine supports but does not require a stay or stay of federal litigation, accusing OpenAI of “repeatedly erring” on the law.
The judge acknowledged that there were similarities and overlaps in the two cases — the defendants in the federal case are also named in the state case, and that the Soelberg and Adams estates allege the same causes of action, which include strict liability for failure to warn and design defect, negligent design defect and failure to warn, violation of California’s unjust survival law, and tort.
However, he found he had “substantial doubt” that resolving the state case would resolve the federal one.
“For example, whether GPT-o4 encourages—rather than protects—delusions, paranoia, and harm to third parties in a way that caused Adams’ death is not necessarily related to whether GPT-o4 encourages delusions, paranoia, and self-harm in a way that caused Soelberg’s suicide,” Seeborg wrote.
He continued: “Similarly, the failure to warn depends on the defendants’ knowledge, actual or constructive, of the danger which may not be the same danger in the case of Soelberg’s violence to himself as compared to that to Adams.”
Representatives for neither party immediately responded to a request for comment.
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