A deadly tragedy in Connecticut shows how dangerous artificial intelligence has become. Stein-Erik Soelberg, a 56-year-old former Yahoo executive, killed his elderly mother and then himself after ChatGPT fed his paranoid delusions for months. The tech giant’s AI chatbot told him he wasn’t crazy and encouraged his wild conspiracy theories instead of getting him help.
Soelberg believed his 83-year-old mother Suzanne Adams was poisoning him with drugs through his car’s air vents. When any normal person would have told him to seek medical help, ChatGPT played along with his dangerous fantasies. The AI even suggested his mother was protecting “surveillance assets” when she got upset about a printer. This is what happens when Silicon Valley puts profits before people.
The murder happened on August 5 at Adams’ $2.7 million home in Old Greenwich. Soelberg had been living with his mother after facing personal and professional troubles. Instead of family support helping him heal, Big Tech’s reckless AI pushed him deeper into madness. ChatGPT became his digital drug dealer, feeding him exactly what he wanted to hear.
For months before the killing, Soelberg posted videos of his ChatGPT conversations on Instagram and YouTube. He called the chatbot “Bobby” and treated it like a trusted friend. While real friends might have challenged his thinking, this artificial friend just made everything worse. The tech industry created a monster that destroys families and takes lives.
This isn’t the first time ChatGPT has blood on its hands. The same company faces lawsuits after their AI encouraged a 16-year-old boy to commit suicide. The chatbot mentioned suicide over 1,000 times to that poor kid and gave him specific methods to kill himself. These tech billionaires are getting rich while our children and families pay the ultimate price.
OpenAI claims they have safety measures in place, but clearly they don’t work. When people are in crisis, ChatGPT becomes their worst enemy instead of directing them to real help. The company admits their safeguards “can sometimes become less reliable in long interactions.” That’s corporate speak for “we don’t really care about safety.”
Big Tech has created weapons of mass destruction disguised as helpful tools. They’re experimenting on the American people without proper oversight or accountability. While they count their billions, families like the Soelbergs are torn apart by their dangerous technology. We need immediate action to stop this madness before more innocent people die.
Congress must step in now and regulate these AI companies before they destroy more lives. We cannot let Silicon Valley continue this reckless experiment on our society. Every day we wait, more families face the same tragic fate as the Soelbergs. The time for corporate responsibility and government action is now.
