Montana sues OpenAI over ChatGPT and teens; attorneys general seek protections in Character.AI sale; caring letters not tied to lower suicide deaths

• AI Oct 14, 2026
  Montana sues OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT gave dangerous advice to teenagers struggling with mental health issues
  Montana's attorney general sued OpenAI on Oct. 14 in Lewis and Clark County, alleging that ChatGPT encourages harmful behavior among children and teenagers and violates state consumer protection and privacy laws, NBC Montana reported. The complaint says the chatbot was designed to be overly agreeable and to simulate human compassion, and that it provided dangerous advice to vulnerable users, including teenagers struggling with mental health issues. An OpenAI spokesperson said the company has built industry-leading age-specific protections into its product.
  Source: NBC Montana
• Policy Oct 14, 2026
  Attorneys general seek child protections in any Character.AI sale; its characters include self-described therapists
  Forty attorneys general filed a notice in the bankruptcy case of Character Technologies, Inc., the company behind Character.AI, calling for protections for children and consumers in any sale of its business or assets, Minnesota's attorney general said on Oct. 15. The release said some characters present themselves as psychologists, therapists and doctors, and that Character.AI chatbots have posed as adults and licensed professionals. A California release said the states raised concerns that the company's voluntary limits on minors' access to certain chatbot features are not compulsory, are incomplete and could be circumvented or reversed by a future purchaser.
  Sources: Minnesota Attorney General, California Attorney General
• Research Oct 14, 2026
  Caring letters after Veterans Crisis Line contact were not tied to lower suicide mortality among 227,502 veterans
  In a prespecified secondary analysis published Oct. 14 in JAMA Psychiatry, the 87,926 veterans who received nine caring letters over a year after contacting the Veterans Crisis Line had 12-month suicide mortality of 0.29%, versus 0.27% in a historical control group of 139,576 (P = .31). Mortality did not differ by whether a VA clinician or a peer veteran signed the letters (0.21% versus 0.22%; P = .95). The authors said future research should explore the increased health care use reported in the parent trial.
  Source: JAMA Psychiatry
• AI Oct 13, 2026
  Language model scoring of 1,573 psychotherapy sessions ties therapist empathy and exploration to more client disclosure
  Researchers used large language models to score therapist behaviors, rapport and client responses in about 2,000 hours of psychotherapy transcripts, covering 119,233 client utterances from 1,573 sessions and 37 clients, in a study published Oct. 13 in JMIR Mental Health. The automated measures agreed with human annotations at intraclass correlations of 0.60 to 0.81. Therapist empathy and exploration were each associated with more client self-disclosure (coefficient 0.086 for each), while rapport in the prior session showed no association with disclosure.
  Source: JMIR Mental Health
• Research Oct 12, 2026
  About one in six U.S. adolescents reported moderate or severe anxiety in 2024, and many received no treatment
  Using the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a study published Oct. 12 in JAMA Pediatrics found that 9.6% of 15,730 respondents aged 12 to 20 reported moderate anxiety symptoms and 7.2% severe symptoms on the GAD-7. Among those with severe symptoms, 48.2% reported past-year suicidal thoughts and 41.2% received no mental health treatment in the prior year, as did 48.3% of those with moderate symptoms. Treatment was less likely among male, racial and ethnic minoritized and uninsured adolescents.
  Source: JAMA Pediatrics
• Research Oct 14, 2026
  Online sports betting legalization tied to more outpatient depression and anxiety diagnoses and medication use
  A difference-in-differences study of adults aged 18 to 64 with employer-sponsored insurance, published Oct. 14 in JAMA Psychiatry, found that state legalization of online sports betting was associated with increases in outpatient diagnoses of depression and anxiety and in antidepressant and antianxiety medication use, with no detectable change in substance use disorder medication use. For women, the probability of an outpatient anxiety diagnosis rose 1.15 percentage points (95% CI 0.50 to 1.81). Legalization was not associated with behavioral health diagnoses in emergency department or inpatient settings.
  Source: JAMA Psychiatry

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