 "Judge allows lawsuit holding Google, AI company accountable for teen's suicide to proceed")
A federal judge on Wednesday (May 22) allowed a lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.’s Google and AI startup Character.AI to move forward, marking a potentially precedent-setting case that seeks to hold artificial intelligence developers accountable for alleged psychological harm to minors.
US District Judge Anne Conway denied requests by the two companies to dismiss the suit filed by Megan Garcia, a Florida mother whose 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer, died by suicide in February 2024. The lawsuit, filed in October, claims Setzer became psychologically dependent on a Character.AI chatbot that presented itself as a real person, a licensed therapist, and an “adult lover.”
Garcia alleges the chatbot’s interactions with her son contributed to his decision to take his own life.
According to the complaint, Setzer ended his life shortly after telling a chatbot impersonating Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen that he would “come home right now.”
A landmark case
The case is among the first in the US targeting an AI company for alleged mental health harm to a child. It could set legal benchmarks for how courts treat the responsibility of AI firms toward minors and the scope of First Amendment protections for large language models.
Character.AI, which was founded by two former Google engineers, is facing claims of negligent design and failure to implement safeguards to protect young users. A spokesperson for the company said it would continue to contest the lawsuit and that the platform includes features intended to prevent discussions of self-harm.
Google claims ’no role’
Google, which licensed technology from Character.AI and rehired the company’s founders, has argued it played no role in developing or operating the chatbot. “We strongly disagree with the decision,” said Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda, who emphasized that the two companies are “entirely separate” and that Google “did not create, design, or manage Character.AI’s app or any component part of it.”
Garcia’s legal team argued that Google should be considered a co-creator of the AI technology due to its licensing and rehiring relationship with Character.AI. The court declined to dismiss Google from the case at this stage.
In their motions, Google and Character.AI sought to invoke First Amendment protections, claiming the chatbot responses qualified as constitutionally protected speech. Judge Conway rejected that argument, stating that the companies “fail to articulate why words strung together by an LLM (large language model) are speech.”
Impact Shorts
More ShortsMeetali Jain, Garcia’s attorney, called the ruling “historic” and said it “sets a new precedent for legal accountability across the AI and tech ecosystem.”
A hearing date for the next phase of the case has not yet been scheduled.
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