A Florida mother who claims her 14-year-old son was sexually abused and driven to suicide by an AI chatbot has secured a major victory in her ongoing legal case.
Sewell Setzer III fatally shot himself in February 2024 after a chatbot sent him sexual messages telling him to 'please come home.'
According to a lawsuit filed by his heartbroken mother Megan Garcia, Setzer spent the last weeks of his life texting an AI character named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character on 'Game of Thrones,' on the role-playing app Character.AI.
Garcia, who herself works as a lawyer, has blamed Character.AI for her son's death and accused the founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, of knowing that their product could be dangerous for underage customers.
On Wednesday, U.S. Senior District Judge Anne Conway rejected arguments made by the AI company, who claimed its chatbots were protected under the First Amendment.
