ChatGPT may start alerting authorities about youngsters considering suicide, says CEO
The company behind ChatGPT could start calling the authorities when young users talk seriously about suicide, its co-founder has said.Sam Altman raised fears that as many as 1,500 people a week could be discussing taking their own lives with the chatbot before doing so.The chief executive of San Francisco-based OpenAI, which operates the chatbot with an estimated 700 million global users, said the decision to train the system so the authorities were alerted in such emergencies was not yet final.But he said it was “very reasonable for us to say in cases of, young people talking about suicide, seriously, where we cannot get in touch with the parents, we do call authorities”.Altman highlighted the possible change in an interview with the podcaster Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, which came after OpenAI and Altman were sued by the family of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old from California who killed himself after what his family’s lawyer called “months of encouragement from ChatGPT”.
It guided him on whether his method of taking his own life would work and offered to help him write a suicide note to his parents, according to the legal claim,Altman said the issue of users taking their own lives kept him awake at night,It was not immediately clear which authorities would be called or what information OpenAI has that it could share about the user, such as phone numbers or addresses, that might assist in delivering help,It would be a marked change in policy for the AI company, said Altman, who stressed “user privacy is really important”,He said that currently, if a user displays suicidal ideation, ChatGPT would urge them to “please call the suicide hotline”.
After Raine’s death in April, the $500bn company said it would install “stronger guardrails around sensitive content and risky behaviours” for users under 18 and introduce parental controls to allow parents “options to gain more insight into, and shape, how their teens use ChatGPT”.“There are 15,000 people a week that commit suicide,” Altman told the podcaster.“About 10% of the world are talking to ChatGPT.That’s like 1,500 people a week that are talking, assuming this is right, to ChatGPT and still committing suicide at the end of it.They probably talked about it.
We probably didn’t save their lives.Maybe we could have said something better.Maybe we could have been more proactive.Maybe we could have provided a little bit better advice about ‘hey, you need to get this help, or you need to think about this problem differently, or it really is worth continuing to go on and we’ll help you find somebody that you can talk to’.”The suicide figures appeared to be a worldwide estimate.
The World Health Organization says more than 720,000 people die by suicide every year.Altman also said he would stop some vulnerable people gaming the system to get suicide tips by pretending to be asking for the information for a fictional story they are writing or medical research.He said it would be reasonable “for underage users and maybe users that we think are in fragile mental places more generally” to “take away some freedom”.“We should say, hey, even if you’re trying to write the story or even if you’re trying to do medical research, we’re just not going to answer.”A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to add to Altman’s comments, but referred to recent public statements including a pledge to ”increase accessibility with one-click access to emergency services” and “to intervene earlier and connect people to certified therapists before they are in an acute crisis.
” In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie.In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14.Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Snapchat allows drug dealers to operate openly on platform, finds Danish study
Snapchat has been accused by a Danish research organisation of leaving an “overwhelming number” of drug dealers to openly operate on Snapchat, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA.The social media platform has said it proactively uses technology to filter out profiles selling drugs. However, research by Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), a Danish research organisation that promotes responsible digital development, has found evidence of a failure to moderate drug-related language in usernames. It also accused Snapchat of failing to respond adequately to reports of profiles openly selling drugs.Researchers used profiles of 13-year-olds and found a multitude of people selling drugs on Snapchat under usernames featuring keywords such as “coke”, “weed” and “molly”
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How to Save the Internet by Nick Clegg review – spinning Silicon Valley
Nick Clegg chooses difficult jobs. He was the UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, a position from which he was surely pulled in multiple directions as he attempted to bridge the divide between David Cameron’s Conservatives and his own Liberal Democrats. A few years later he chose another challenging role, serving as Meta’s vice-president and then president of global affairs from 2018 until January 2025, where he was responsible for bridging the very different worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington DC (as well as other governments). How to Save the Internet is Clegg’s report on how he handled that Herculean task, along with his ideas for how to make the relationships between tech companies and regulators more cooperative and effective in the future.The main threat that Clegg addresses in the book is not one caused by the internet; it is the threat to the internet from those who would regulate it
Apple debuts thinner, $999 iPhone Air at ‘awe-dropping’ annual product event
Apple debuted its latest iPhone on Tuesday, trumpeting the smartphone’s slimmest design yet. The device, named the iPhone Air, is one of several upgrades the company unveiled at its annual product showcase, promoted with the title “awe-dropping”. The event kicked off at 10am PT with the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, speaking in front of its Cupertino headquarters.“Design is at the core of everything we do,” Cook said. The CEO touted the company’s thin iPhone, which sports a width of 5
How Google dodged a major breakup – and why OpenAI is to thank for it
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you as I finish the audiobook version of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I can’t say I found compelling.In tech – artificial intelligence is having its day in court with an 11th-hour appearance in Google’s landmark antitrust trial and Anthropic’s major settlement with book authors.Google dodged a catastrophic breakup, and it has its biggest competitor to thank for that, according to the judge who could have forced the tech giant to sell off Chrome, the most popular web browser in the world, and perhaps Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system.Amit Mehta, who ruled in 2024 that Google had built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the internet search business, said last week that he would not force the most drastic remedy on the tech giant
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Experts are concerned about people emotionally depending on AI, but these women say their digital companions are misunderstoodThe Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.A young tattoo artist on a hiking trip in the Rocky Mountains cozies up by the campfire, as her boyfriend Solin describes the constellations twinkling above them: the spidery limbs of Hercules, the blue-white sheen of Vega.The Guardian’s journalism is independent
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