Mother sues Google-owned Character.AI over son’s suicide, calling him “collateral damage” in a “big experiment”

A smartphone, against a dark background, with its screen covered in dozens of AI avatars, with a speech bubble reading "It's nice to see ya".

A mother in Florida is suing the Google-owned Character.AI platform, claiming it had a large part in the suicide of her 14-year-old son.

Sewell Setzer III fatally shot himself in February 2024, weeks before his 15th birthday, after developing what his mother calls a “harmful dependency” on the platform, no longer wanting to “live outside” the fictional relationships it had created.