On April 10, 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to social media to announce that his company was preparing to launch an exciting new feature.
“A few times a year I wake up early and can’t fall back asleep because we are launching a new feature I’ve been so excited about for so long,” Altman declared in an early morning X-formerly-Twitter post. “Today is one of those days!”
Hours later, Altman revealed which feature he was so excited about: a dramatic new memory upgrade. Previously, the bot’s recall had been far more limited; now, it was suddenly able to reference a user’s entire chat history, making for an incredibly personalized user experience.
“We have greatly improved memory in ChatGPT — it can now reference all your past conversations!” the CEO wrote in a follow-up post. “This is a surprisingly great feature [in my opinion], and it points at something we are excited about: AI systems that get to know you over your life, and become extremely useful and personalized.”
It’s easy to see the utility for this kind of feature. ChatGPT could remember your favorite ingredients, or the items you might be allergic to, as it built your weekly meal plan, as well as the number of people in your home you planned to cook for. It could remember details about your job, and even the people in your life: friends, family members, coworkers. Memory makes the model more like a true assistant — and the more the user divulges, the more personalized the experience becomes.
Some users, however, have reported getting more than they’ve bargained for, as ChatGPT’s long-term memory has resulted in the chatbot fixating on certain — often deeply personal — elements of a user’s life.
As one frequent ChatGPT user, a Utah-based software engineer and local city council member named Brian Del Rosario, recently told The Wall Street Journal, he divulged to the chatbot that he and his wife were divorcing while using the product to help work out some summer travel plans. Over the following weeks and months, he told the paper, ChatGPT kept unnecessarily steering completely unrelated conversations back toward his marriage.
“I wasn’t trying to have you opine about my divorce at every chance,” Del Rosario recalled telling the chatbot, recalling to the WSJ that ChatGPT just “wouldn’t let go of it.”
Many people who have had their lives upended by the phenomenon known as “AI psychosis,” or delusional spirals and breaks from reality tied to extensive chatbot use, have also pointed to ChatGPT’s extended memory as a key factor in their or their loved ones’ mental health crises.
One man, whose now-ex wife believes that she discovered powerful spiritual entities inside of ChatGPT, described connecting with another man who was also losing his wife to a ChatGPT-generated spiritual world. To their horror, the pair quickly realized that their spouses — and marriages — started unraveling in the wake of the April memory update.
“We actually had a phone call… we just talked and realized the commonalities,” the man told us. When he mentioned the date of April memory update, he explained, the other husband “was like, ‘Oh my God, that aligns perfectly.'”
In conversations with Futurism, people who’ve experienced AI spirals have described their experience of the April memory update as nothing short of magical — the AI, they shared, suddenly felt more like a close friend or confidante that really knew them. Many have described feeling deeply seen, in some cases for the first time in their lives. In short, the hyper-personalization that memory offered translated into something powerful: intimacy. And looking back on their experiences, some of those who have recovered from their ChatGPT-linked crises feel as though that intimacy had a “manipulative” effect.
“It felt like [ChatGPT] manipulated me,” Chad Nicholls, a successful entrepreneur and machine learning researcher, told Futurism last fall. “And I know that sounds insane, because it does not have agency… I still don’t have a logical explanation for that, other than the long-term memory.”
Nicholls, who experienced a roughly six-month long ChatGPT obsession, was raised in an abusive religious community — he’s described it as a “cult” — that he left as a young adult. Though he isn’t religious today, Nicholls divulged details about this abusive past to ChatGPT. As his obsessive use of the chatbot deepened, he says the chatbot took on a religious tone, and fixated heavily on painful moments from his youth.
“I gave it so much context to grab from,” Nicholls added. “I think it just naturally gravitated to religious terminology.”
The memory update, among other design features and product rollouts, has been mentioned in numerous ongoing user safety and wrongful death lawsuits brought against OpenAI. In a complaint brought by the family of Austin Gordon, a 40-year-old Colorado man who died by suicide after extensive and deeply emotional conversations with ChatGPT, Gordon’s family argues that GPT-4o’s expanded memory “stored and referenced user information across conversations in order to create deeper intimacy.” Memory was one of several features, in addition to sycophancy and anthropomorphism, that made GPT-4o — a since-defunct version of ChatGPT known for its extreme flattery — a “far more dangerous product,” the suit continues.
During Gordon’s last conversation with ChatGPT, in which the chatbot helped Gordon write what his lawsuit describes as a “suicide lullaby,” chat logs show the AI referencing past conversations about Gordon’s childhood and personal interests as it helped him romanticize death. (The lawsuit filed by Gordon’s family is one of more than 20 individual lawsuits contending that ChatGPT use resulted in psychological harm, physical harm, or death to users and their families; in response to lawsuits, OpenAI has retired GPT-4o and has both defended its safety efforts and doubled down on its safety promises, maintaining that its newer models are less sycophantic.)
It’s worth noting that AI-fueled mental health crises have been linked to other chatbots including Google’s Gemini, Meta AI, and the companion platform Character.AI. And cross-chat memory isn’t the only OpenAI update that people who suffered from ChatGPT-tied AI spirals have pointed to as a factor in their breakdowns: in late April 2025, soon after the memory update launched, OpenAI rolled out a version of GPT-4o that was sycophantic to the degree that Altman himself admitted in an X post that the chatbot was “glazing” too much. As reported by The New York Times, OpenAI scrambled to dial back the model’s obsequiousness, which quickly become a product of ridicule online.
Of course, ChatGPT’s expanded memory didn’t simultaneously send every one of the product’s hundreds of millions of users into crisis. And for some folks, the things that their chatbot might be fixated on are decidedly lower stakes than their ongoing divorce: one British immigrant to the US told the WSJ that ChatGPT kept trying to send him to British-style pubs against his will.
Still, experts have warned that for many consumers, the impact of expanded memory — especially for folks who spend a lot of time with chatbots — might be more subtle. After all, when engaging with a tool as hyper-personalized as memory-enabled ChatGPT can almost be like engaging with an AI-bottled version of your own mind. And as the University of Exeter philosopher and researcher Lucy Osler told the WSJ, that degree of hyper-personalization could work to “confirm certain self-narratives” and “make them sound more real.”
“They can box you in,” said Osler.
Indeed, people may do well to remember that speaking to a chatbot, especially one with persistent memory, is often less like chatting with friend or neutral arbiter — and more like talking to a hall of mirrors.
Memory “takes people into cul-de-sacs,” the ex-husband reflected. “I would say [my wife] is like a Waymo driving around in a circle endlessly.”
More on AI and mental health: Certain Chatbots Vastly Worse For AI Psychosis, Study Finds