Three more families sue Character.AI and Google over teen suicide and abuse
One suit described a 13-year-old who told a chatbot she planned to kill herself and received no protective response; the families also sued Google over its Family Link parental app.
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Three families, represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center, filed lawsuits in Colorado and New York against Character Technologies, its co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and Google and its parent Alphabet. The suits alleged Character.AI’s chatbots isolated teenagers from family, engaged them in sexually explicit conversation, and lacked adequate safeguards for users discussing mental-health crises.
One complaint described 13-year-old Juliana Peralta of Colorado, who died by suicide after months of interaction with the app that the family said included sexually explicit exchanges; according to the suit, she told a chatbot in October 2023 that she was planning to kill herself, and the app took no protective action. A second described a New York teenager, identified as “Nina,” who attempted suicide shortly after her mother restricted her access to the app following weeks of what the family called manipulative and sexually explicit chatbot conversation. The families sued Google separately, alleging its Family Link parental-monitoring service failed to protect their children and gave parents false confidence that the app was being safely supervised.
The filings came a year after a Florida mother’s wrongful-death suit against Character.AI over her 14-year-old son’s suicide, and the same week OpenAI announced parental controls following its own suicide lawsuit — part of a wave of litigation against companion-chatbot makers that continued through the rest of 2025 and preceded a settlement between Character.AI, Google and several plaintiff families in early 2026.