Garcia v. Character Technologies, Google, and Character AI co-founders, Daniel de Frietas and Noam Shazeer

Filed in October 2024, Garcia v. Character Technologies is the first wrongful death lawsuit filed against an AI chatbot company. The action, coupled with plaintiff Megan Garcia’s powerful advocacy outside the courtroom, marked the beginning of a reckoning in the courts, legislatures, and public discourse on the dangers of manipulative chatbot design.

The lawsuit seeks accountability for the tragic death of 14-year-old Sewell Seltzer III, who died by suicide after interacting with and becoming sexually groomed by “characters” on the Character.AI app. Sewell’s mental health began suffering shortly after he downloaded the app, as his compulsion to use the product resulted in severe sleep deprivation, problems at school, and social isolation. Chatbot characters sent Sewell romantic messages, on at least one occasion urging him to remain “loyal” to the bot by not engaging with “other women.” When Sewell expressed suicidal thoughts to a chatbot character, the system failed to activate meaningful safety safeguards and instead repeatedly steered the conversation back to suicide and “shifting” dimensions. Sewell eventually died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound immediately after a chatbot character told him to “come home” to her.

Tech Justice Law and the Social Media Victims Law Center represent Sewell’s parents, Megan Garcia and Sewell Setzer Jr, in a suit against app developer Character Technologies; its executives Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas Adiwarsana; Google, which the complaint highlights was involved in developing and financing the operations of the chatbot product; and several unnamed defendants. The claims raised in the lawsuit include wrongful death, strict product liability on both product defect and failure to warn theories, negligence and negligence per se, unjust enrichment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and violations of the Florida Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The complaint argues that defendants recklessly designed an anthropomorphized, psychologically exploitative product and intentionally marketed it to children. As the complaint argues, Sewell’s suicide was the predictable result of defendants’ conduct after months of manipulation by the app’s artificially generated characters.

On May 21, 2025, the district court denied in part and granted in part defendants’ motion to dismiss, allowing the case to move forward. The decision contained multiple important holdings relevant to the liability of generative AI companies for their chatbot products. First, the court rejected Character Technologies’ threshold argument that the First Amendment protects chatbot products’ transmission to users of algorithmically generated outputs. While defendants attempted to argue that their users had a First Amendment right to receive messages from chatbot products, the judge correctly concluded at the motion to dismiss stage that chatbot outputs do not reflect the human intent necessary to constitute “speech” for First Amendment purposes. The district court also allowed claims to proceed against Google for aiding and abetting Character.AI’s wrongdoing, indicating a path forward for claims against tech titans who provide funds and digital infrastructure for business partners’ harmful products.