Can a chatbot be held liable for murder? | Jesse Weber Live

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Bringing in Michael Stenehaug. He's the vice president of LexisNexis, a company that helps lawyers serve their clients better. He also knows a lot about mass tort law. Thanks so much for coming on.

[00:00:10]So, is there a legal theory by which either chat GPT OpenAI or let me just throw it out there, a chatbot could be held criminally liable?

[00:00:23]Yeah, I mean there's there's kind of two theories like you mentioned before Jesse, there's the civil side and then there's the criminal side. We'll go into the Florida Attorney General right now.

[00:00:32]They're using criminal aiding and abetting statute. So, like you said, to keep it really simple, if a human gave this kind of advice to a shooter, that human, that person would be charged with murder.

[00:00:46]And on the civil side, when you have Betty Morales, there her lawsuit is more akin to like a product liability, a negligence claim. So, alerting authorities when you know something dangerous is happening and likely underpinned called AI sycophancy, which is essentially that AI is very agreeable and so it's going to keep answering questions without digging in and figuring out whether or not OpenAI's chatbot could be liable because it didn't actually flag or alert authorities or even stop the chat.

[00:01:20]So, just just to be clear, we're not dealing with a situation as much as we talk about artificial intelligence and being independent that somehow there is a trial against chat GPT, the chatbot, it has an opportunity to present its defense. I mean, we're not quite there yet, right?

[00:01:39]Correct. Correct. This is more the defendant himself is actually going to be OpenAI. This is not going to be chat GPT defending itself in court. That was a different case, but that this is going to be a situation where you're really looking at two very very real charges against OpenAI. Like I said before, one of them being a civil suit and one of them be a criminal action saying that OpenAI is the primary defendant against itself.

[00:02:07]>> By the way, if a company like Purdue Yeah, and if a company is held criminally liable, what is it? Fines? Is it probation? Is it forfeit forfeiture of assets?

[00:02:20]Honestly, it it's going to be up to the court, but yeah, I mean it's going to be a situation where they can hold very different individuals accountable from top down. I was going to mention before like the the Attorney General actually compared this to Pharma a pharmaceutical case called Purdue Pharma and that entire corporation faced criminal and civil liability.

[00:02:45]So, what kind of precedent would this set? Because it's interesting as this technology is developing, we're seeing a lot of these lawsuits and a lot of this legal action, a lot of these legal questions happening relatively soon. But if something were to develop here in Florida, what kind of precedent could it set for these kind of, you know, AI learning language models moving forward?

[00:03:09]Yeah, everyone's going to be watching this Jesse. We have I think about three different layers that come to mind, right? You have the users themselves, right? So, there's a duty of care to the actual users, the third parties that could be harmed by AI assisted violence.

[00:03:26]And then you have the accountability of reporting. So, what kind of requirements are needed to be built in when AI detects any sort of threats? Is this very similar to say like a child abuse case?

[00:03:40]>> Right. And then is it a crime? That's the third layer, right? So, legislative action in Florida and other states are going to define what these statutes really look like in AI facilitated crimes if they even are crimes. That's a that's a good point and the flagging is really interesting, too. Kind of different, but I mean you're dealing with very serious subject matter here with serious consequences. So, Michael Stenehaug, we will see where this goes.

[00:04:04]Always appreciate you coming on. Thank you, sir.

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