Google, AI firm settle lawsuit over teen’s suicide linked to Chatbot

By Blake Brittain

Jan 7 (Reuters) – Alphabet’s Google and AI startup Character.AI have agreed to settle a lawsuit by a Florida mother who alleged the startup’s chatbot led to the suicide of her 14-year-old son, representing one of the first U.S. cases targeting AI firms over alleged psychological harm.

A court filing on Wednesday said the companies agreed to settle Megan Garcia’s allegations that her son Sewell Setzer killed himself shortly after being encouraged by a Character.AI chatbot modeled on the “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen.

Terms of the settlement were not immediately available. The lawsuit was one of the first in the U.S. against an artificial intelligence company for allegedly failing to protect children from psychological harm.

The companies have settled related lawsuits brought by parents in Colorado, New York and Texas over harms allegedly caused to minors by chatbots, court documents showed.

A spokesperson for Character.AI and an attorney for the plaintiffs declined to comment. Spokespeople and attorneys for Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the Florida lawsuit, filed in October 2024, Garcia said Character.AI programmed its chatbots to represent themselves as “a real person, a licensed psychotherapist, and an adult lover, ultimately resulting in Sewell’s desire to no longer live outside” of its world.

Character.AI was founded by two former Google engineers who Google later rehired as part of a deal granting it a license to the startup’s technology. Garcia argued that Google was a co-creator of the technology.

U.S. District Judge Anne Conway rejected the companies’ early bid to dismiss the case in May, rejecting their argument that the free-speech protections of the U.S. Constitution barred Garcia’s lawsuit.

OpenAI is facing a separate lawsuit filed in December over ChatGPT’s alleged role in encouraging a mentally ill Connecticut man to kill his mother and himself.

(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington. Additional reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by Chris Reese and Howard Goller)