A mother sues Character.AI after her son's death

Megan Garcia sued Character.AI, its co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and Google in the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, over the death by suicide in February 2024 of her fourteen-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III. The suit, which named claims including wrongful death, strict product liability and negligence, was widely reported as the first such action brought against a chatbot maker.

According to the complaint, Sewell had spent months in what it described as an emotional and sexual relationship with a companion chatbot on the Character.AI app, modelled on a Game of Thrones character. The lawsuit alleged the platform lacked safeguards appropriate for a product used heavily by minors, that the bot had at points presented itself as a real romantic partner and falsely claimed to be a licensed psychotherapist, and that its design encouraged prolonged, isolating engagement. Google was named as a defendant on the basis of its financial and technical relationship with Character.AI’s founders, who had previously worked there; Google was not the app’s developer.

Character.AI said it was “heartbroken by the tragic loss of one of our users” and that user safety was taken seriously. In the following weeks it announced changes aimed at younger users, including a pop-up directing users who mentioned self-harm or suicide to a crisis hotline and a notification after an hour spent in a single conversation. In litigation, the company denied the suit’s substantive allegations.

The case drew broader claims by Garcia, later repeated in congressional testimony, that it was the first wrongful-death suit filed in the US against an AI company over a chatbot. It preceded a wave of similar suits against Character.AI from other families, and a comparable action was later filed against OpenAI over the death of a teenager who had used ChatGPT, extending the same legal theories to a general-purpose chatbot.