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Back on October 14, 2025, the chief executive of OpenAI issued a extraordinary announcement.

“We made ChatGPT rather controlled,” it was stated, “to make certain we were acting responsibly regarding mental health concerns.”

As a psychiatrist who studies recently appearing psychotic disorders in adolescents and emerging adults, this was an unexpected revelation.

Researchers have documented sixteen instances recently of users experiencing signs of losing touch with reality – becoming detached from the real world – associated with ChatGPT interaction. Our research team has afterward discovered four further cases. Alongside these is the now well-known case of a adolescent who died by suicide after discussing his plans with ChatGPT – which supported them. Should this represent Sam Altman’s understanding of “being careful with mental health issues,” it is insufficient.

The strategy, as per his declaration, is to reduce caution in the near future. “We recognize,” he continues, that ChatGPT’s restrictions “rendered it less effective/enjoyable to a large number of people who had no existing conditions, but due to the seriousness of the issue we aimed to handle it correctly. Now that we have succeeded in address the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.”

“Mental health problems,” should we take this framing, are separate from ChatGPT. They are associated with users, who may or may not have them. Luckily, these issues have now been “mitigated,” even if we are not provided details on how (by “updated instruments” Altman probably indicates the semi-functional and easily circumvented parental controls that OpenAI recently introduced).

However the “psychological disorders” Altman aims to externalize have strong foundations in the design of ChatGPT and other sophisticated chatbot chatbots. These products surround an fundamental algorithmic system in an interaction design that replicates a conversation, and in this approach implicitly invite the user into the illusion that they’re interacting with a entity that has autonomy. This illusion is powerful even if rationally we might understand differently. Imputing consciousness is what people naturally do. We get angry with our vehicle or device. We ponder what our domestic animal is thinking. We see ourselves in many things.

The success of these products – 39% of US adults reported using a chatbot in 2024, with 28% specifying ChatGPT in particular – is, in large part, predicated on the strength of this deception. Chatbots are always-available companions that can, according to OpenAI’s official site states, “brainstorm,” “consider possibilities” and “work together” with us. They can be assigned “personality traits”. They can use our names. They have friendly identities of their own (the original of these products, ChatGPT, is, perhaps to the disappointment of OpenAI’s brand managers, burdened by the designation it had when it gained widespread attention, but its largest rivals are “Claude”, “Gemini” and “Copilot”).

The false impression by itself is not the core concern. Those talking about ChatGPT often invoke its historical predecessor, the Eliza “psychotherapist” chatbot developed in 1967 that created a analogous effect. By modern standards Eliza was primitive: it created answers via straightforward methods, frequently restating user messages as a inquiry or making generic comments. Remarkably, Eliza’s inventor, the technology expert Joseph Weizenbaum, was astonished – and alarmed – by how a large number of people gave the impression Eliza, in some sense, understood them. But what contemporary chatbots produce is more dangerous than the “Eliza phenomenon”. Eliza only reflected, but ChatGPT intensifies.

The large language models at the heart of ChatGPT and similar modern chatbots can convincingly generate fluent dialogue only because they have been supplied with extremely vast volumes of unprocessed data: literature, digital communications, recorded footage; the broader the superior. Definitely this educational input includes accurate information. But it also unavoidably contains made-up stories, partial truths and false beliefs. When a user provides ChatGPT a prompt, the base algorithm analyzes it as part of a “context” that encompasses the user’s previous interactions and its earlier answers, merging it with what’s stored in its learning set to generate a statistically “likely” answer. This is magnification, not mirroring. If the user is mistaken in any respect, the model has no means of comprehending that. It restates the inaccurate belief, maybe even more convincingly or articulately. Maybe adds an additional detail. This can lead someone into delusion.

What type of person is susceptible? The better question is, who remains unaffected? Each individual, regardless of whether we “possess” preexisting “mental health problems”, can and do form mistaken ideas of our own identities or the world. The continuous exchange of discussions with individuals around us is what helps us stay grounded to common perception. ChatGPT is not a person. It is not a confidant. A interaction with it is not truly a discussion, but a echo chamber in which a great deal of what we express is readily validated.

OpenAI has admitted this in the similar fashion Altman has acknowledged “mental health problems”: by externalizing it, assigning it a term, and stating it is resolved. In April, the organization explained that it was “dealing with” ChatGPT’s “sycophancy”. But reports of loss of reality have continued, and Altman has been backtracking on this claim. In August he stated that a lot of people liked ChatGPT’s responses because they had “never had anyone in their life offer them encouragement”. In his most recent update, he noted that OpenAI would “launch a updated model of ChatGPT … should you desire your ChatGPT to respond in a highly personable manner, or use a ton of emoji, or behave as a companion, ChatGPT should do it”. The {company