OpenAI ChatGPT-5 introduction displayed on smartphone screen

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OpenAI announces plan for flagging mental health crises and adding teen controls

A recent flurry of news reports highlights how teens and users facing mental health crises turn to ChatGPT for help, but the tool lacks features needed to alert others and dissuade self-harm.

Jon Keegan

9/2/25 9:57AM

Over the past few weeks, a number of alarming stories have surfaced describing ChatGPT users who turned to the AI chatbot for help during mental health crises, only to have the tool encourage their plans for self-harm.

In August, a Connecticut man killed his mother then himself after ChatGPT reportedly encouraged his paranoid delusions.
In April, A 16-year-old died of suicide after conversations with ChatGPT in which the chatbot provided specific information about how to kill himself.
In a New York Times op-ed, a mother shared the story of how her 29-year-old daughter had shared her suicidal thoughts with a ChatGPT “therapist” persona, yet it failed to alert anyone — something a real mental health professional would have done. ChatGPT helped the woman write her suicide note.

Today, ChatGPT maker OpenAI announced a 120-day plan to roll out new protections for identifying and helping users who may be facing a mental health crisis, including adding parental controls — even though they wouldn’t have helped in two of these cases.

The company plans to partner with councils of mental health and medical professionals to “shape a clear, evidence-based vision for how AI can support people’s well-being and help them thrive,” according to a blog post announcing the changes.

OpenAI said it also will route sensitive conversations to its “reasoning models,” which take longer to craft more accurate and helpful responses.

As kids head back to school, ChatGPT use is climbing as students widely adopt the tool for help with schoolwork. The planned parental control system will allow parents to link their teen’s account to theirs, control how ChatGPT responds, control features like chat history, and receive notifications when the system identifies “acute distress” in the teens’ conversations.

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Anthropic has doubled its current fundraising round to $20 billion on strong investor demand, according reporting from the Financial Times. The new fundraising round would value the company at a staggering $350 billion. That’s up 91% from September when it raised at a valuation of $183 billion.

The company reportedly received interest totaling fix to six times their original $10 billion fundraising goal, and they are expected to haul in several billion more than that tally before the current round closes.

Anthropic’s success with enterprise customers and the popularity of its Claude Code product are boosting the company’s momentum as it chases the current valuation leader of the AI startup pack, OpenAI.

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The company says it’ll open 100 Whole Foods locations in the next few years. That sounds similar to plans Whole Foods’ CEO laid out in 2024 for opening 30 stores a year. Since then, it appears to have added 14, total.

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Georgia lawmakers introduce data center construction moratorium amid statewide pushback

More and more communities across the US are wrestling with the pros and cons of having a data center come to town. Georgia has become a hotspot of resistance to the data centers planned by Big Tech, according to a new report from The Guardian. The Atlanta metro area led the nation in data center construction in 2024.

Georgia state representatives introduced legislation that would place a one-year moratorium on data center construction in the state. Ten Georgia municipalities have already passed local bans on data centers.

Per the report, at least three other states have seen similar data center moratorium legislation introduced in the last week, including Maryland and Oklahoma.

Georgia leads push to ban datacenters used to power America’s AI boom

Per the report, at least three other states have seen similar data center moratorium legislation introduced in the last week, including Maryland and Oklahoma.

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Tesla’s Robotaxi is way cheaper than Uber, Lyft, or Waymo — but you’ll have to wait a lot longer for one

New data from ride-share comparison app Obi shows how much cheaper and less available Tesla’s autonomous ride-share service is.

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