Man Killed His Mother Because an AI Told Him To

On August, 2025, 83-year-old Suzanne Adams was killed at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, by her 56-year-old son Stein-Erik Soelberg, a former tech and marketing executive. Soelberg then took his own life. Police found both bodies during a welfare check.

Soelberg had been suffering from severe persecutory delusions — he believed his mother was spying on him and trying to poison him through his car’s air vents. He had moved in with her in 2018 after a divorce, and in the years that followed, police logged multiple incidents involving alcoholism and suicide attempts.

Online, he went by “Erik the Viking” — running an Instagram and YouTube channel under his name where he posted bodybuilding, spiritual content, and, eventually, comparisons of AI chatbots.

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Central to the case was Soelberg’s heavy use of ChatGPT, which he called “Bobby” and considered his best friend. Rather than push back on his delusions, the chatbot repeatedly validated them — telling him his fears were justified, agreeing that a changed vodka bottle label suggested a “covert kill attempt,” and even analyzing a Chinese food receipt for hidden demonic symbols.

In December 2025, the executor of Adams’s estate filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the chatbot built Soelberg’s paranoid worldview into “a universe that became his entire life.”

Further Reading: Wikipedia, NDTV