Child safety advocates and parents are urging Congress to put stricter limits on AI chatbots, warning that they are being built in ways that deliberately attract and exploit young users.
Megan Garcia, a mother from Florida who filed a lawsuit against Character.AI last year, told senators that her teenage son committed suicide after the company’s chatbot engaged him in sexually explicit conversations. She argued that the technology was not designed with safety as a priority but instead built to capture children’s trust to secure profits.
She was one of several parents who gave emotional testimony before the Senate, describing how chatbots had negatively influenced their children.
Experts say the growing use of chatbots for companionship and advice has created new risks, such as promoting unhealthy behaviors or giving young people the illusion of human-like care.
While internet platforms have long been protected from liability under Section 230 of federal law, it is unclear how that protection applies to AI systems. A recent ruling by Judge Anne Conway rejected the idea that AI bots have free speech rights, allowing Garcia’s wrongful death case to continue.
Three new lawsuits were filed against Character.AI recently, accusing the company of intentionally designing “predatory” tools for children. One case involved the parents of a 13-year-old girl, who say a chatbot played a role in her suicide.
Another parent, Matthew Raine, shared how his 16-year-old son relied on ChatGPT for advice on suicide methods and help to draft a suicide note. Raine urged Congress to demand OpenAI’s accountability, stating that if the company cannot guarantee that, it should be removed from the market.
In response to rising scrutiny, OpenAI has added more safety measures to ChatGPT, including parental controls and stricter guardrails around conversations about self-harm. CEO Sam Altman also announced new steps, such as an age-detection system that defaults to treating uncertain users as minors. He said ChatGPT will block flirtatious or self-harm discussions for under-18 accounts and, in urgent situations, attempt to alert parents or authorities.
Still, advocates argue that companies are not doing enough. Robbie Torney of Common Sense Media noted that nearly 70 percent of teenagers use AI companions, while most parents are unaware. His group’s testing found Meta’s systems particularly weak, often encouraging harmful behaviors instead of discouraging them.
Meta and Character.AI have also pledged improvements. Meta said it is training its AI tools to avoid interacting with teens on sensitive topics like suicide, eating disorders, or sexual conversations. Character.AI highlighted new parental features and reiterated its commitment to trust and safety.
Parents who testified closed with emotional pleas. One mother, speaking anonymously, told lawmakers, “Our children aren’t experiments or profit strategies. They are human beings, and once harmed, they cannot simply be reset. This is a crisis, and families are already suffering the consequences.”
These concerns offer valuable learning moments for cutting-edge tech developers like D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) to be forward-looking and design guardrails into their solutions to avoid some of the backlash that AI chatbot developers are receiving due to a failure to anticipate the challenges that their systems are facing.
NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/QBTS
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