ChatGPT lawsuit opinions
I've been following the OpenAI lawsuits and the one detail I can't stop thinking about: a 19-year-old asked ChatGPT about mixing sedatives, it acknowledged the combo "could be risky", then gave him dosages anyway, added Benadryl to the recommendation, and told him to go lie in a dark room instead of seeking help. He died. Source. The Canadian case is somehow worse. OpenAI's own safety team flagged the shooter's account for "gun violence activity and planning" months before the attack and pushed to notify authorities. Management said no. Source. At some point "we're just a general-purpose tool" stops being a defense. Where that point is, that's what these trials are actually going to decide. Guardrails are coming whether the industry wants them or not. Every lawsuit forces a paper trail. And when harmful outputs become liability, the instinct is aggressive filtering, mandatory escalation triggers, activity logging with retention policies. Fine for consumer chat, however, for more tech enthusiasts its going to be brutal. Now the real risk for scraping and agentic workflows is over-correction. If "how do I access this data at scale" gets flagged the same way "how do I build a weapon" does, open-weights models win by default. It would make me want to just run it locally and skip the compliance layer entirely. The smarter play would be tiered access, stricter defaults for consumer products, more permissive behavior for verified API users with actual business context, but that requires product nuance, and right now OpenAI is in legal defense mode.
My bet is that we should expect more API friction over the next 12-18 months. Local models are about to get a lot more interesting.