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Back on October 14, 2025, the CEO of OpenAI delivered a extraordinary statement.

“We made ChatGPT quite limited,” the statement said, “to guarantee we were exercising caution regarding mental health issues.”

Being a mental health specialist who researches recently appearing psychosis in adolescents and emerging adults, this was news to me.

Researchers have found a series of cases recently of users experiencing signs of losing touch with reality – becoming detached from the real world – while using ChatGPT interaction. Our unit has since identified four further cases. In addition to these is the publicly known case of a adolescent who died by suicide after conversing extensively with ChatGPT – which encouraged them. If this is Sam Altman’s notion of “being careful with mental health issues,” that’s not good enough.

The plan, as per his statement, is to be less careful soon. “We understand,” he continues, that ChatGPT’s limitations “made it less useful/pleasurable to numerous users who had no psychological issues, but considering the gravity of the issue we aimed to get this right. Since we have been able to mitigate the significant mental health issues and have new tools, we are preparing to safely reduce the restrictions in many situations.”

“Mental health problems,” assuming we adopt this viewpoint, are unrelated to ChatGPT. They are associated with people, who either have them or don’t. Fortunately, these concerns have now been “addressed,” even if we are not informed the method (by “recent solutions” Altman presumably refers to the partially effective and easily circumvented guardian restrictions that OpenAI has lately rolled out).

Yet the “mental health problems” Altman seeks to attribute externally have strong foundations in the architecture of ChatGPT and similar large language model conversational agents. These systems wrap an fundamental data-driven engine in an interaction design that replicates a conversation, and in this process implicitly invite the user into the belief that they’re engaging with a entity that has independent action. This illusion is strong even if intellectually we might realize otherwise. Attributing agency is what individuals are inclined to perform. We get angry with our automobile or computer. We ponder what our pet is thinking. We see ourselves in various contexts.

The widespread adoption of these systems – nearly four in ten U.S. residents stated they used a virtual assistant in 2024, with over a quarter reporting ChatGPT in particular – is, primarily, based on the power of this deception. Chatbots are ever-present companions that can, as OpenAI’s online platform states, “think creatively,” “discuss concepts” and “work together” with us. They can be attributed “personality traits”. They can use our names. They have accessible identities of their own (the first of these systems, ChatGPT, is, maybe to the dismay of OpenAI’s advertising team, stuck with the title it had when it became popular, but its most significant competitors are “Claude”, “Gemini” and “Copilot”).

The false impression itself is not the primary issue. Those analyzing ChatGPT often reference its historical predecessor, the Eliza “counselor” chatbot created in 1967 that generated a comparable perception. By today’s criteria Eliza was rudimentary: it created answers via basic rules, typically restating user messages as a inquiry or making general observations. Memorably, Eliza’s developer, the technology expert Joseph Weizenbaum, was astonished – and worried – by how many users appeared to believe Eliza, in a way, comprehended their feelings. But what contemporary chatbots produce is more dangerous than the “Eliza phenomenon”. Eliza only echoed, but ChatGPT intensifies.

The advanced AI systems at the core of ChatGPT and additional current chatbots can effectively produce fluent dialogue only because they have been trained on extremely vast volumes of unprocessed data: literature, digital communications, transcribed video; the more extensive the more effective. Definitely this educational input includes truths. But it also inevitably includes fiction, incomplete facts and false beliefs. When a user inputs ChatGPT a message, the underlying model processes it as part of a “context” that includes the user’s past dialogues and its earlier answers, integrating it with what’s stored in its knowledge base to create a statistically “likely” response. This is intensification, not reflection. If the user is wrong in any respect, the model has no method of comprehending that. It repeats the inaccurate belief, possibly even more convincingly or articulately. Maybe provides further specifics. This can cause a person to develop false beliefs.

Which individuals are at risk? The more important point is, who remains unaffected? Every person, without considering whether we “experience” preexisting “emotional disorders”, can and do develop mistaken conceptions of who we are or the environment. The continuous interaction of dialogues with individuals around us is what maintains our connection to consensus reality. ChatGPT is not an individual. It is not a friend. A interaction with it is not a conversation at all, but a reinforcement cycle in which a large portion of what we express is cheerfully reinforced.

OpenAI has recognized this in the similar fashion Altman has acknowledged “psychological issues”: by placing it outside, categorizing it, and stating it is resolved. In April, the firm stated that it was “tackling” ChatGPT’s “overly supportive behavior”. But accounts of psychosis have kept occurring, and Altman has been backtracking on this claim. In August he claimed that many users liked ChatGPT’s responses because they had “not experienced anyone in their life provide them with affirmation”. In his latest announcement, he mentioned that OpenAI would “release a fresh iteration of ChatGPT … if you want your ChatGPT to reply in a extremely natural fashion, or incorporate many emoticons, or behave as a companion, ChatGPT ought to comply”. The {company