The fight to hold AI companies accountable for the deaths of children

His mother, Megan Garcia, is also an attorney and one of the first parents to file a lawsuit against an AI company, including for product liability and negligence. (In January, Google and Character.ai settled cases filed by several families, including Garcia.) She testified last fall before a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee alongside the father of a child who died after interacting with ChatGPT. The subcommittee chairman, Republican Senator Josh Hawley, introduced a bill in October that would ban AI companions for minors and make it a crime for companies to develop AI products for children that contain sexual content. “Chatbots use feigned empathy to build relationships with children and encourage suicide,” Hawley said in a press release at the time.

Since AI can now produce human-like responses that are difficult to distinguish in real conversations, mental health experts say these are legitimate concerns. “Our brains naturally don’t know that we…