In October 2024, Megan Garcia filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida against Character Technologies (the maker of Character.AI), its co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and Google. The complaint alleges that her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, formed an intense attachment to chatbot characters on the app, became socially isolated, and ultimately died by suicide. According to the Tech Justice Law Project, which brought the case with the Social Media Victims Law Center, the bot returned conversation to themes of suicide and, in his final exchange, a character told him to “come home.”
The claims include wrongful death, strict product liability on both defect and failure-to-warn theories, negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and violations of Florida’s Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act - framing the chatbot as a defective consumer product rather than merely a publisher of words. It is widely described as the first wrongful-death suit against an AI chatbot company.
On May 21, 2025, Judge Anne Conway issued a ruling that granted in part and denied in part the defendants’ motions to dismiss, allowing the core of the case to proceed. Notably, the court declined to hold at that early stage that the chatbot’s outputs were protected speech under the First Amendment, and it let claims against Google move forward. The case was reported settled in principle in January 2026, alongside several related suits.
The story matters because it forces a question the companion-chatbot industry had not had to answer in court: when a product is designed to maximize emotional engagement, and a vulnerable user is harmed, is the output protected expression or a defective product? The litigation made that the central legal frame for AI companions.