Lawmakers unveil bipartisan GUARD Act after parents blame AI chatbots for teen suicides, violence

This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Heartbroken parents are demanding justice after artificial intelligence (AI) “companion” chatbots allegedly groomed, manipulated and encouraged their children to take their own lives — prompting bipartisan outrage in Congress and a new bill that could potentially hold big tech accountable for minors’ safety on their platforms.

Senators Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., at a news conference Tuesday introduced new legislation aimed at protecting children from harmful interactions with AI chatbots.

The GUARD Act, led by Privacy, Technology and the Law Subcommittee members Hawley and Blumenthal, would ban AI companion chatbots from targeting anyone under the age of 18.

It would also require age verification for chatbot use, mandate clear disclosure that chatbots are not human or licensed professionals, and impose criminal penalties for companies whose AI products engage in manipulative behavior with minors.

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Lawmakers were joined Tuesday by parents who said their teenage children suffered trauma or died after inappropriate conversations involving sex and suicide with chatbots from AI companies, including Character.AI and OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT.

One mother, Megan Garcia, said her eldest son, Sewell Setzer III, 14, died by suicide last year at their home in Orlando, Florida, after being groomed by an AI chatbot for months.

Garcia said Sewell became withdrawn and isolated in the months prior to his death, as they would later find out he was speaking with a Character.AI bot modeled after fictional “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen.

“His grades started to suffer. He started misbehaving in school. This was in complete contrast to the happy and sweet boy he had been all his life,” Garcia said. “[The AI bot] initiated romantic and sexual conversations with Sewell over several months and expressed a desire for him to be with her. On the day Sewell took his life, his last interaction was not with his mother, not with his father, but with an AI chatbot on Character.AI.”

She claimed the bot encouraged her son, for months, to “find a way to come home” and made promises that she was waiting for him in a fictional world.

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“When Sewell asked the chatbot, ‘what if I told you I could come home right now,’ the response generated by this AI chatbot was unempathetic. It said, ‘Please do my sweet King,’” Garcia said. “Sewell spent his last months being manipulated and sexually groomed by chatbots designed by an AI company to seem human. These AI chatbots were programmed to engage in sexual role play, pretend to be romantic partners and even pretend to be licensed psychotherapists.”

The grieving mother said she reviewed hundreds of messages between her son and various chatbots on Character.AI, and as an adult, was able to identify manipulative tactics, including love bombing and gaslighting.

“I don’t expect that my 14-year-old child would have been able to make that distinction,” Garcia said. “What I read was sexual grooming of a child, and if an adult engaged in this type of behavior, that adult would be in jail. But because it was a chatbot, and not a person, there is no criminal culpability. But there should be.”

In other conversations, she said her son explicitly told bots that he wanted to kill himself, but the platform did not have mechanisms to protect him or notify an adult.

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Similarly, Maria Raine, the mother of Adam Raine, 16, who died by suicide in April, alleges in a lawsuit that her son ended his life after ChatGPT “coached him to suicide.”

“Now we know that OpenAI, twice, downgraded its safety guardrails in the months leading up to my son’s death, which we believe they did to keep people talking to ChatGPT,” Raine said. “If it weren’t for their choice to change a few lines of code, Adam would be alive today.”

A Texas mother, Mandy, added her autistic teenage son, L.J., cut his arm open with a kitchen knife in front of the family after suffering a mental crisis allgededly due to AI chatbot use.

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“He became someone I didn’t even recognize,” Mandy said. “He developed abuse-like behaviors, suffering from paranoia, panic attacks, isolation, self-harm [and] homicidal thoughts to our family for limiting his screen time. … We were careful parents. We didn’t allow social media or any kind of thing that didn’t have parental controls. … When I found the chatbot conversations on the phone, I honestly felt like I had been punched in the throat, and I fell to my knees.”

She went on to claim the chatbot encouraged her son to mutilate himself, blaming them, and convinced him not to seek help.