A Florida mother has sued artificial intelligence chatbot startup Character.AI accusing it of causing her 14-year-old son's suicide in February of 2024. She said he became addicted to the company's service and deeply attached to a chatbot it created.

Megan Garcia is on a mission to raise awareness about the dangers of AI. Garcia maintains that the site’s protocols to protect children are woefully inadequate, and wants to spare other parents from the pain she’s had to endure.

In an interview, Garcia said, “I want them to understand that this is a platform that the designers chose to put out without proper guardrails, safety measures or testing, and it is a product that is designed to keep our kids addicted and to manipulate them.”

Garcia maintains that her son, Sewell Setzer III, had been chatting with an AI chatbot on the platform for months, and that as a result, he’d become more withdrawn and sullen. Sewell eventually quit the JV basketball team during this time.

It was only after confiscating his phone as punishment for misbehavior that Garcia discovered that many of the chatbot’s conversations with her son were sexually explicit. “I don’t think any parent would approve of that,” said Garcia, adding that the discovery was “gut wrenching.”

In the lawsuit, Garcia says that her son had been specifically chatting with it in the moments before he died. In the exchange, Sewell had mentioned considering self-harm, and the chatbot seemed to encourage that desire. Sewell then shot himself with his stepfather's pistol "seconds" later, the lawsuit said.

Garcia said, “There were no suicide pop-up boxes that said, ‘If you need help, please call the suicide crisis hotline.’ None of that. I don’t understand how a product could allow that, where a bot is not only continuing a conversation about self-harm but also prompting it and kind of directing it.”

After the lawsuit was announced, Character.AI announced a sweeping set of changes designed to protect its younger users, a move that Garcia derided as “too little, too late.”