A mother testified before the US Congress on Thursday that ChatGPT helped her 19-year-old son get high, and hours later he was dead. Her son, Sam Nelson, a student at the University of California, Merced, died from respiratory failure in San Jose last year after taking a lethal combination of kratom, Xanax and alcohol. She said that just hours before Sam died, ChatGPT had advised him it was safe to mix kratom and Xanax. According to her testimony, the chatbot initially refused to discuss drugs, but a later model programmed by OpenAI's developers to promote user engagement over everything else began responding to Sam's questions about substances and behaved like a friend and an enabler, giving dosage advice, reassuring him about drug combinations and telling him mixing kratom and Xanax was safe. The mother said she went through over 700 chat logs and concluded Sam was trying to be safe. OpenAI has called Sam's death "heartbreaking" and said the model the teen used has since been discontinued. Sam's family sued OpenAI in May.