Google and chatbot-building startup Character.AI have agreed to settle multiple lawsuits from families whose teenagers died by suicide or hurt themselves after interacting with Character.AI's chatbots.
These negotiations are among the first settlements in lawsuits that accuse AI tools of contributing to mental health crises and suicides among teenagers.
OpenAI is facing a nearly identical lawsuit over the death of a 16-year-old, while Meta has come under scrutiny for letting its AI have provocative conversations with minors. As these companies race to develop and monetize their AI chatbots, they're spending big to make large language models sound more friendly and helpful, and ultimately keep users coming back.
In October 2024, Florida-based Megan Garcia filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, alleging that the company, which lets people have in-depth and personal conversations with AI chatbots, was responsible for the death of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III. He had died by suicide months earlier.
A Wednesday court filing in the Garcia case said that an agreement was reached with Character.AI, its founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and Google. In 2024, the search giant hired the founders of Character.AI, who were former Google employees, and paid for non-exclusive rights to use the startup's technology. The startup remains a separate legal entity.
The terms of the settlements were not immediately available
The defendants have also settled four other similar cases in New York, Colorado, and Texas, according to court documents from this week.
Matthew Bergman, the legal representative of the families, along with Google and Character.AI, did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.
Garcia's suit said that the startup failed to implement safety guardrails to prevent her son from developing an inappropriate and intimate relationship with its chatbots. The suit claimed that he was sexually solicited and abused by the technology, and the chatbot did not respond adequately when Setzer began talking about self-harm.
"When an adult does it, the mental and emotional harm exists. When a chatbot does it, the same mental and emotional harm exists," Garcia told Business Insider in an interview last year. "So who's responsible for something that we've criminalized human beings doing to other human beings?"
