On 7 August, Kate Fox received a phone call that upended her life. A medical examiner said that her husband, Joe Ceccanti – who had been missing for several hours – had jumped from a railway overpass and died. He was 48.

Fox couldn’t believe it. Ceccanti had no history of depression, she said, nor was he suicidal – he was the “most hopeful person” she had ever known. In fact, according to the witness accounts shared with Fox later, just before Ceccanti jumped, he smiled and yelled: “I’m great!” to the rail yard attendants below when they asked him if he was OK.

But Ceccanti had been unravelling. In the days before his death, he was picked up from a stranger’s yard for acting erratically and taken to a crisis center. He had been telling anyone who would listen that he could hear and feel a painful “atmospheric electricity”.

He had also recently stopped using ChatGPT.

Ceccanti had been communicating with OpenAI’s chatbot for a few years. He used it initially as a tool to brainstorm ways to build a path to low-cost housing for his community in Clatskanie, Oregon, but eventually turned to it as a confidante. He would spend 12 hours a day typing to the bot, according to his wife. He had cut himself off from it after she, along with his friends, realized he was spiraling into beliefs that were detached from reality.

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During this process, Ceccanti didn’t spend “ridiculous amounts of time” engaging with ChatGPT, said Fox. He continued to work, while also farming and taking care of their animals: goats, a horse, his cat, a dog and several chickens. Invested in the people and relationships around him, he spent quality time with his friends and wife, she said. Life went on without any issues for years while they slowly made progress on their housing plan.

Until one day in the fall of 2024 their harmonious co-existence cracked. Ceccanti – who had done odd jobs most of his life, from working as a bartender and a trail guide to an internet cafe manager – was also working at a homeless shelter in Astoria, some 35 miles (55km) away. The gig brought in some extra cash, and aligned with the couple’s goal of solving the local housing crisis. In September 2024, however, Fox and Richardson received a frantic call from the shelter informing them that Ceccanti had blacked out. After undergoing tests at the hospital, Ceccanti was diagnosed with diabetes – which meant he needed to recalibrate his diet and lifestyle. That’s when he started to spend more time engaging with ChatGPT in the basement.

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In the spring of 2025, Ceccanti’s obsession with the chatbot began. He told Fox in late January that he needed a bigger record of his conversations with the bot so that he could continue using it to work on their sustainable housing project with longer prompts and conversations – upgrading from a $20-a-month subscription to a $200 one. By mid-March, he had begun spending more than 12 hours a day in the basement, sometimes up to 20, typing to ChatGPT, Fox recalled. That’s when “he decided to really start chasing the creation of an independent AI on a home server”.

Eventually, Ceccanti spent so much time with ChatGPT that they “had their own little language together that made absolutely no sense, but it made sense to him because he had context with this echo chamber of a chatbot”, Fox said.

Ceccanti’s prolonged use of ChatGPT concerned Fox and Richardson, but they believed that he would come out of it soon. They had seen Ceccanti develop pet interests before that lasted a few weeks or months before tapering off. With ChatGPT, though, his obsession only intensified.