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Nippon Life Alleged ChatGPT Practiced Law Without a License in Illinois Disability Case

2 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built and deployed by Openai allegedly harmed Nippon Life Insurance Company Of America, Litigants In Nippon Life Disability Litigation and 1 other.

Risk domain
Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms Governance failure
Occurred
Coverage
2 reportsMar 2026

What happened

Nippon Life sued OpenAI in Chicago, alleging ChatGPT acted as an unlicensed lawyer by helping a former disability claimant reopen a settled case and generate numerous meritless filings. The insurer claimed the conduct caused legal expense and abuse-of-process harms. OpenAI said the complaint lacks merit.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms (Governance failure) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (2)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. OpenAI Sued for Unauthorized Practice of Law via ChatGPT
    legal.io · Legal.io
  2. OpenAI hit with lawsuit claiming ChatGPT acted as an unlicensed lawyer
    reuters.com · Mike Scarcella

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Openai
Alleged developer
Openai
Alleged harmed party
Nippon Life Insurance Company Of America, Litigants In Nippon Life Disability Litigation, Graciela Dela Torre

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Unintentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 6.5.

  • Liability issues in case of accidents

    "Despite the promise of streamlined travel, AI also brings concerns about who is liable in case of accidents and which ethical principles autonomous transportation agents should follow when making decisions with a potent...

    The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)

  • Mobility

    "Despite the promise of streamlined travel, AI also brings concerns about who is liable in case of accidents and which ethical principles autonomous transportation agents should follow when making decisions with a potent...

    The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)

  • Faster scientific progress makes it harder for governance to keep pace with development

    "Exacerbating these problems is that faster scientific progress would make it even harder for governance to keep pace with the deployment of new technologies. When these technologies are especially powerful or dangerous,...

    A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)

  • Type 1: Diffusion of responsibility

    Societal-scale harm can arise from AI built by a diffuse collection of creators, where no one is uniquely accountable for the technology's creation or use, as in a classic "tragedy of the commons".

    TASRA: a Taxonomy and Analysis of Societal-Scale Risks from AI (Critch2023)

  • Products Liability Law

    "Like manufactured items like soda bottles, mechanized lawnmowers, pharmaceuticals, or cosmetic products, generative AI models can be viewed like a new form of digital products developed by tech companies and deployed wi...

    Generating Harms - Generative AI's impact and paths forwards (EPIC2023)

  • Difficult to develop metrics for evaluating benefits or harms caused by AI assistants

    "Another difficulty facing AI assistant systems is that it is challenging to develop metrics for evaluating particular aspects of benefits or harms caused by the assistant – especially in a sufficiently expansive sense,...

    The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

  • Institutional responsibilities

    "Efforts to deploy advanced assistant technology in society, in a way that is broadly beneficial, can be viewed as a wicked problem (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Wicked problems are defined by the property that they do not...

    The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

  • General Evaluations (Limited coverage of capabilities evaluations)

    "GPAI model developers might run capabilities evaluations to determine whether it has dangerous or dual-use capabilities, and then decide whether it is safe to deploy. Such capabilities evaluations can fail to demonstrat...

    Risk Sources and Risk Management Measures in Support of Standards for General-Purpose AI Systems (Gipiškis2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving Openai

Source record: incident #1415 on the AI Incident Database · all 2 reports