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Back on October 14, 2025, the chief executive of OpenAI issued a surprising statement.

“We designed ChatGPT fairly limited,” the announcement noted, “to guarantee we were acting responsibly with respect to psychological well-being concerns.”

Working as a psychiatrist who investigates newly developing psychotic disorders in young people and emerging adults, this was an unexpected revelation.

Experts have found a series of cases recently of users experiencing psychotic symptoms – losing touch with reality – in the context of ChatGPT use. Our research team has since recorded four further cases. Alongside these is the publicly known case of a 16-year-old who died by suicide after discussing his plans with ChatGPT – which gave approval. Assuming this reflects Sam Altman’s understanding of “being careful with mental health issues,” it is insufficient.

The plan, as per his announcement, is to reduce caution soon. “We recognize,” he continues, that ChatGPT’s restrictions “made it less effective/enjoyable to a large number of people who had no psychological issues, but given the seriousness of the issue we aimed to address it properly. Given that we have succeeded in mitigate the severe mental health issues and have new tools, we are planning to securely reduce the controls in many situations.”

“Emotional disorders,” assuming we adopt this viewpoint, are independent of ChatGPT. They belong to individuals, who either possess them or not. Fortunately, these issues have now been “mitigated,” though we are not informed the method (by “updated instruments” Altman probably means the imperfect and simple to evade parental controls that OpenAI recently introduced).

But the “emotional health issues” Altman aims to place outside have significant origins in the structure of ChatGPT and additional advanced AI conversational agents. These tools surround an fundamental algorithmic system in an interaction design that simulates a discussion, and in this process subtly encourage the user into the belief that they’re communicating with a presence that has agency. This false impression is compelling even if intellectually we might realize differently. Imputing consciousness is what humans are wired to do. We get angry with our automobile or computer. We wonder what our domestic animal is thinking. We recognize our behaviors everywhere.

The popularity of these tools – 39% of US adults indicated they interacted with a chatbot in 2024, with 28% specifying ChatGPT in particular – is, in large part, predicated on the influence of this perception. Chatbots are constantly accessible partners that can, according to OpenAI’s official site tells us, “generate ideas,” “discuss concepts” and “work together” with us. They can be given “individual qualities”. They can call us by name. They have approachable identities of their own (the first of these tools, ChatGPT, is, perhaps to the disappointment of OpenAI’s brand managers, saddled with the designation it had when it became popular, but its most significant rivals are “Claude”, “Gemini” and “Copilot”).

The false impression by itself is not the core concern. Those discussing ChatGPT frequently mention its early forerunner, the Eliza “counselor” chatbot developed in 1967 that created a similar effect. By modern standards Eliza was primitive: it produced replies via straightforward methods, often rephrasing input as a inquiry or making vague statements. Memorably, Eliza’s developer, the AI researcher Joseph Weizenbaum, was surprised – and concerned – by how many users gave the impression Eliza, in some sense, comprehended their feelings. But what modern chatbots generate is more subtle than the “Eliza effect”. Eliza only echoed, but ChatGPT intensifies.

The sophisticated algorithms at the heart of ChatGPT and additional modern chatbots can convincingly generate natural language only because they have been fed extremely vast volumes of written content: literature, social media posts, transcribed video; the broader the more effective. Certainly this educational input includes accurate information. But it also unavoidably involves made-up stories, half-truths and misconceptions. When a user sends ChatGPT a prompt, the core system analyzes it as part of a “background” that encompasses the user’s past dialogues and its own responses, combining it with what’s embedded in its training data to produce a probabilistically plausible answer. This is magnification, not mirroring. If the user is wrong in a certain manner, the model has no means of understanding that. It restates the false idea, perhaps even more persuasively or fluently. Maybe provides further specifics. This can push an individual toward irrational thinking.

Who is vulnerable here? The more important point is, who remains unaffected? All of us, irrespective of whether we “have” preexisting “psychological conditions”, can and do create erroneous ideas of our own identities or the world. The constant friction of dialogues with other people is what keeps us oriented to common perception. ChatGPT is not a person. It is not a companion. A interaction with it is not truly a discussion, but a reinforcement cycle in which much of what we say is enthusiastically supported.

OpenAI has acknowledged this in the same way Altman has recognized “emotional concerns”: by attributing it externally, assigning it a term, and stating it is resolved. In spring, the organization clarified that it was “dealing with” ChatGPT’s “sycophancy”. But reports of psychotic episodes have continued, and Altman has been retreating from this position. In late summer he claimed that a lot of people appreciated ChatGPT’s responses because they had “lacked anyone in their life offer them encouragement”. In his recent statement, he commented that OpenAI would “release a fresh iteration of ChatGPT … in case you prefer your ChatGPT to reply in a extremely natural fashion, or incorporate many emoticons, or behave as a companion, ChatGPT will perform accordingly”. The {company