Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
Parents of children who died by suicide following extensive interactions with AI chatbots are testifying this week in a Senate hearing about the possible risks of AI chatbot use, particularly for minors.
The hearing, titled “Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots,” will be held this Tuesday by the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, a bipartisan delegation helmed by Republican Josh Hawley of Arkansas. It’ll be live-streamed on the judiciary committee’s website.
The parents slated to testify include Megan Garcia, a Florida mother who in 2024 sued the Google-tied startup Character.AI — as well as the company’s cofounders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, and Google itself – over the suicide of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, who took his life after developing an intensely intimate relationship with a Character.AI chatbot with which he was romantically and sexually involved. Garcia alleges that the platform emotionally and sexually abused her teenage son, who consequently experienced a mental breakdown and an eventual break from reality that caused him to take his own life.
Also scheduled to speak to Senators are Matt and Maria Raine, California parents who in August filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI following the suicide of their 16-year-old son, Adam Raine. According to the family’s lawsuit, Adam engaged in extensive, explicit conversations about his suicidality with ChatGPT, which offered unfiltered advice on specific suicide methods and encouraged the teen — who had expressed a desire to share his dark feelings with his parents — to continue to hide his suicidality from loved ones.
Both lawsuits are ongoing, and the companies have pushed back against the allegations. Google and Character.AI attempted to have Garcia’s case dismissed, but the presiding judge shot down their dismissal motion.
In response to litigation, both companies have moved — or at least made big promises — to strengthen protections for minor users and users in crisis, efforts that have included installing new guardrails directing at-risk users to real-world mental health resources and implementing parental controls.
Character.AI, however, has repeatedly declined to provide us with information about its safety testing following our extensive reporting on easy-to-find gaps in the platform’s content moderation.
Regardless of promised safety improvements, the legal battles have raised significant questions about minors and AI safety at a time when AI chatbots are increasingly ubiquitous in young people’s lives, despite a glaring lack of regulation designed to moderate chatbot platforms or ensure enforceable, industry-wide safety standards.
In July, an alarming report from the nonprofit advocacy group Common Sense…
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