Sam Altman Hits Back at Elon Musk Over ChatGPT Safety Claims

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has hit back at Elon Musk after the Tesla chief publicly warned against using ChatGPT.

Altman accused Musk of hypocrisy after he cited deaths allegedly linked to the AI chatbot while ignoring fatal crashes “apparently” tied to Tesla's Autopilot technology.

The clash erupted when an X user posted that "ChatGPT has now been linked to 9 deaths tied to its use, and in 5 cases its interactions are alleged to have led to death by suicide, including teens and adults,” to which Musk responded, "Don't let your loved ones use ChatGPT."

“Sometimes you complain about ChatGPT being too restrictive, and then in cases like this you claim it's too relaxed,” Altman tweeted, noting that, “Almost a billion people use it and some of them may be in very fragile mental states.”

AI chatbots face scrutiny

The spat lands amid legal and regulatory scrutiny of AI chatbots and their impact on vulnerable users, with OpenAI facing multiple wrongful death lawsuits tied to alleged failures in mental-health safeguards.

“We will continue to do our best to get this right… but these are tragic and complicated situations that deserve to be treated with respect,” the OpenAI CEO added.

Altman turned the safety argument back on Musk, citing reports that “more than 50 people” have died in crashes linked to Tesla’s Autopilot and saying his own brief experience left him thinking it was “far from a safe thing” to have released, before declining to comment further on Musk’s Grok chatbot decisions.

"You take 'every accusation is a confession' so far,” he noted.

OpenAI disclosed last year that approximately 1.2 million of its 800 million weekly users discuss suicide with the chatbot each week, with hundreds of thousands showing signs of suicidal intent or psychosis.

Seven families filed lawsuits against the platform in November, alleging the company's GPT-4o model was released prematurely and without effective safeguards.

Four of the lawsuits address ChatGPT's alleged role in family members' suicides, while the other three claim ChatGPT reinforced harmful delusions that, in some cases, resulted in inpatient psychiatric care.

Last month, OpenAI faced its first lawsuit linking ChatGPT to a homicide, with the estate of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman suing the company and Microsoft, alleging that the chatbot validated the delusional beliefs of Stein-Erik Soelberg, who then killed his mother, Suzanne Adams, before dying by suicide in August.

Altman vs Musk

The war of words points to long-time tensions between the OpenAI co-founders.

Musk helped to launch OpenAI in 2015 alongside Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever, but stepped down from its board in 2018, according to an announcement that said his departure would "eliminate a potential future conflict" as Tesla expanded its own AI work.

Since then, Musk has accused OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit mission to become "a closed, profit-driven arm of Microsoft" and has filed multiple lawsuits against the company, including claims over abandoning its founding mission and alleged trade secret theft.

In November, a federal judge allowed Musk's antitrust lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI to proceed toward trial, with X Corp. and xAI seeking billions in damages over Apple making ChatGPT the exclusive AI assistant on iOS while allegedly blocking competitors like Grok.