US Court says Google, AI company must face lawsuit filed by mother over her teen son's suicide; Google responds: Did not ...

Alphabet's Google and artificial-intelligence startup Character.AI must face a lawsuit from a Florida woman named Megan Garcia. Garcia believes that Character.AI is responsible for the death of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, who died by suicide in February this year. Setzer was messaging with the bot in the moments before he died, she alleged in her lawsuit. Garcia claims Character.AI's chatbots contributed to her son's suicide, a U.S. judge has ruled. According to a report by news agency Reuters, the US District Judge Anne Conway stated that the companies had not demonstrated at this early stage of the legal proceedings that the U.S. Constitution's free-speech protections shielded them from Megan Garcia's lawsuit. The lawsuit, considered one of the first in the U.S. against an AI firm for alleged failure to protect children from psychological harm, claims that the teenager died by suicide after developing an obsession with an AI-powered chatbot.

A spokesperson for Character.AI reportedly that the company would continue to contest the lawsuit and employs safety measures on its platform to safeguard minors, including features designed to prevent "conversations about self-harm."

What Google said on the US Court order
Character.AI and Google had requested the court to dismiss the lawsuit on several grounds, including the argument that the chatbots' output constituted constitutionally protected free speech. Judge Conway rejected this argument, stating that Character.AI and Google "fail to articulate why words strung together by an LLM (large language model) are speech." The judge also denied Google's request to be found not liable for allegedly aiding Character.AI's misconduct. Meetali Jain, Garcia's attorney, is said to have hailed the court's decision as "historic" and said it "sets a new precedent for legal accountability across the AI and tech ecosystem."

Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda expressed the company's strong disagreement with the decision. Castaneda also emphasized that Google and Character.AI are "entirely separate" entities and that Google "did not create, design, or manage Character.AI's app or any component part of it."

Google's link to Character.AI
For those wondering Google link of Character.AI, the Character.AI company was founded by two former Google engineers who were later rehired by Google as part of an agreement granting the tech giant a license to the startup's technology. Garcia argued that this arrangement made Google a co-creator of the technology.

What the lawsuit against Google and Character.AI's app claims
She filed the lawsuit in October following the death of her son in February 2024. The lawsuit alleges that Character.AI programmed its chatbots to present 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 digital world.

According to the complaint, Setzer took his own life shortly after telling a Character.AI chatbot impersonating "Game of Thrones" character Daenerys Targaryen that he would "come home right now." Garcia reportedly brought the lawsuit against Character.AI with the help of Matthew Bergman, the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which has also brought cases on behalf of families who said their children were harmed by Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and Discord.