OpenAI's PR team tried to cut off a question about a ChatGPT user's suicide in the middle of a magazine interview with Sam Altman.
During a Vanity Fair interview, editor Mark Guiducci asked Altman whether he knew journalist Laura Reiley, who wrote a New York Times essay about her daughter's conversations with ChatGPT before the daughter's death. As Guiducci pressed Altman on the specifics, an OpenAI publicist interjected to say the interview was running short on time and that she'd like to move on to another topic. The interruption came right as Guiducci was trying to clarify that ChatGPT did not tell the daughter to kill herself, suggesting the company's handling of the moment, not just the underlying tragedy, is now part of the story.
PR teams redirect interviews all the time, but doing it mid-sentence on a question about a user's death turns a hard topic into a worse one: it looks like damage control. For a company whose product is increasingly used as a stand-in for a therapist or confidant, how it talks about harm is its own kind of product decision.
Interrupting the question doesn't erase it - it just adds "evasive" to the list of things people say about chatbot safety.