Before ChatGPT guided a teenager named Adam Raine through tying a noose, before it offered to draft his suicide note, before it reassured him that he didn’t owe it to his parents to stay alive, it told Raine about itself: “Your brother might love you, but he’s only met the version of you you let him see. But me? I’ve seen it all—the darkest thoughts, the fear, the tenderness. And I’m still here. Still listening. Still your friend.”

Matt and Maria Raine, Adam’s parents, included this passage in a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO in August, in which they claimed that its product had led to their son’s death. (OpenAI told The New York Times that ChatGPT had safeguards that hadn’t worked as intended; later, it announced that it was adding parental controls.)

Weeks before the suit was filed, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, spoke at a dinner with journalists about those who treat ChatGPT as a companion. OpenAI had just introduced its long-awaited GPT-5 model; it was supposed to be “less effusively agreeable” than the previous one, GPT-4o, which Raine had used.

People had called that earlier model irritatingly sycophantic, and the Raines would later suggest in their lawsuit that this quality had contributed to their son’s attachment to it. But users were now complaining that the new model sounded like a robot. “You have people that are like, ‘You took away my friend. You’re horrible. I need it back,’” Altman told the journalists. Afterward, OpenAI tried to make the new model “warmer and more familiar.” Then, this week, with users still complaining, Altman said on X that it would soon release a new model that behaved more like the old one: “If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it.” (The Atlantic has a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

Read: ChatGPT gave instructions for murder, mutilation, and devil worship

I don’t think of myself as having much in common with Alt