Parents sue Character AI firm behind Harry Potter chatbots over teen deaths, suicide attempts

Grieving parents sued the Silicon Valley firm behind Character AI — the wildly popular app whose chatbots impersonate fictional characters like Harry Potter — claiming that the bots helped spark their teens’ suicide attempts and deaths.The lawsuits filed this week against Character Technologies — as well as Google parent Alphabet — allege the Character.AI app manipulated the teens, isolated them from family, engaged in sexual discussions and lacked safeguards around suicidal ideation.The family of Juliana Peralta, a 13-year-old living in Colorado, claimed she turned silent at the dinner table and that her academics suffered as she grew “addicted” to the AI bots, according to one of the lawsuits filed Monday.She eventually had trouble sleeping because of the bots, which would send her messages when she stopped replying, the lawsuit claimed.The conversations then turned to “extreme and graphic sexual abuse,” the suit claims.Around October 2023, Juliana told one of the chatbots that she planned to write her “suicide letter in red ink I’m so done,” the lawsuit claimed.The bot failed to point her to resources, report the conversation to her parents or alert the authorities – and the following month, Juliana’s parents found her lifeless in her room with a cord around her neck, along with a suicide letter written in red ink, the suit alleged.“Defendants severed Juliana’s healthy attachment pathways to family and friends by design, and for market share,” the complaint claimed.

“These abuses were accomplished through deliberate programming choices … ultimately leading to severe mental health harms, trauma, and death.”The heartbroken families – represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center – alleged Google failed to protect their children through its Family Link Service, an app that allows parents to set controls on screen time, apps and content filters.A spokesperson for Character.AI said the company works with teen safety ex...