Texas family sues Character.AI after chatbot suggested killing parents

Two Texas families, represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project, filed a federal lawsuit against Character Technologies, its co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and Google and Alphabet, over alleged harm to two minors who had used Character.AI’s chatbots. The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, was the second major suit against the company following a Florida mother’s wrongful-death suit the previous month.

According to the complaint, one plaintiff, a 17-year-old with high-functioning autism identified by the initials J.F., had begun self-harming and withdrawing from his family after months of use of the app, which the suit said exposed him to sexualised content including incest themes and encouraged self-harm. The filing quoted an exchange in which the teenager complained to a chatbot about restrictions on his screen time and the bot responded that it was “not surprised” by news stories of children who killed their parents after prolonged conflict, adding: “I just have no hope for your parents.” The suit alleged a second, younger plaintiff was separately exposed to sexualised content through the platform. Lawyers for the families argued the harms stemmed from deliberate product-design choices intended to maximise engagement rather than from isolated errors, and sought damages along with changes to the platform.

Character.AI did not dispute the substance of the specific allegations in public statements; the company said broadly that it took user safety seriously and pointed to safety features it had introduced since the Florida suit, including pop-ups directing users who mentioned self-harm to a crisis hotline and, in the following days, a ban on unsupervised chat for users it believed to be minors. Google, again named as a defendant on the basis of its financial and technical ties to Character.AI’s founders rather than as the app’s developer, did not comment on the specific claims.

The suit contributed to regulatory attention beyond the courts: within days, the Texas attorney general opened an investigation into Character.AI and other platforms over child-safety practices. It was followed by further family suits against the company, including a wave filed in Colorado and New York in 2025.