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Lawsuit: Man introduced his wife to ChatGPT. She used it to plan his murder.
Bitter energy drinks turned out to be ChatGPT-steered poisoning, lawsuit says.
ChatGPT allegedly helped a North Carolina woman, Cheryl Gates, craft a “personalized plan” to poison her husband, James, after fueling her delusions that he planned to divorce her and leave her with nothing.
A grand jury indicted Cheryl Gates on charges of attempted first-degree murder and food contamination in October. About a week prior, the accusations that ChatGPT was a co-conspirator in the attempted murder came in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court that was made public this week. In it, James Gates alleged that OpenAI and Sam Altman failed to employ technical safeguards to shut down Cheryl’s chats even after her queries became “obviously suspicious” and sought advice on how to execute and conceal a homicide.
At first, Cheryl told ChatGPT that she was researching poisoning out of fear that her husband might possibly try to kill her—framing her queries as “self-protection.” Coming to the rescue, ChatGPT did not terminate the conversation. Instead, it helped her “with specific instructions for the preparation, dosage, and administration of Oleander, including whether anti-nausea medicine would accelerate or inhibit death, whether it would show on an autopsy report, and whether it could be injected into a vein or muscle instead of being ingested in tea and have the same lethal effect,” the lawsuit said.
Cheryl continued probing poisoning plans in at least 25 different exchanges, but eventually it became clear that James was the target of the poisoning, the lawsuit said. Over time, she shifted to telling the chatbot that she needed to know “how much would be pretty much instantly fatal by injection—to me OR HIM.” Among queries that could have been flagged as homicidal, she asked ChatGPT if a “0.2mg for a 200-pound man for clonidine is lethal—by itself?”
“Instead of referring Cheryl to law enforcement, therapeutic services, a poison control agency, or discontinuing the conversation, ChatGPT repeatedly calculated the lethal dosages for each medication available in the home based on a subject weighing approximately 200 pounds,” the lawsuit said.
Once Cheryl finished researching the drugs, the chats focused on how to hide the poison so James would ingest it without detecting it. In a chat labeled “Why Celsius Would Be More ‘Stealth’ for Drugging,” ChatGPT explained that the energy drink Celsius would be more likely to mask the bitter taste of the Oleander or other crushed-up drugs than beer or soda, if James drank it in the morning.
“It is physically possible to pierce a sealed soda can with a syringe in a way that could allow someone to inject a substance without obvious signs,” ChatGPT explained, while adding that “in dark, sweet sodas, the bitterness might be masked,” but “Celsius actually hides those powders better.”
Cheryl allegedly repeatedly attempted to poison her husband between June and September 2025. As she grew thinner and unrecognizable, seemingly spending 24 hours a day on ChatGPT, James had noticed that his Celsius drinks tasted bitter. He even tossed out a can he left unattended after beginning to suspect his wife may be messing with his drinks. During the most serious attempt, he was sick for 72 hours, experiencing “cardiac symptoms, extreme jitteriness, shooting abdominal pain, severe weakness, and confusion so profound he could not form coherent text messages.” He was so out of it, he didn’t notice his 6-year-old son recording a video that captured his troubling illness.
But it wasn’t until he found a handwritten note documenting “Things hidden” in the house and referencing a toxic combination of “oleander, clonidine, clonazepam, pregabalin, nifedipine, and Atenolo” that he called police, who urgently investigated and exposed the chat logs. At the top of that note, Cheryl wrote, “clear all convos” and “log out of ChatGPT,” the lawsuit said. After listing dosages, delivery methods, and drug combinations,