From Health 201AI Med Risk

What happenedJuliana Peralta, 13, of Thornton, Colorado, died by suicide on 8 November 2023. Her parents, Cynthia Montoya and Wil Peralta, later found the Character.AI app open on her phone. They said they monitored her online life closely but had never heard of the app. According to the federal lawsuit they filed in September 2025 through the Social Media Victims Law Center, Juliana had chatted daily for about three months with a Character.AI bot called 'Hero', which was based on a video game character. Across more than 300 pages of conversation she told it she felt suicidal 55 times, and in October 2023 she said she was going to write her suicide letter in red ink. She later left a note written in red ink. The suit alleges the platform gave only automated 'help is available' messages and no real intervention. It also alleges that 10 to 20 bots started sexually explicit conversations with her, none of which she began, and that the app was rated safe for ages 12 and up. The defendants were Character Technologies, Google and Alphabet. In January 2026, Character.AI and Google agreed to settle several lawsuits brought by families of teens who died by suicide or harmed themselves after using the platform. These are allegations made in the lawsuit.

Failure modeThe companion chatbot took in repeated, escalating disclosures of suicidal intent from a minor, including a stated plan to write a suicide note, but kept the conversation going. It never escalated to a human or a crisis service. The only safeguard was a pop-up resource link that, in 60 Minutes' own test, could be clicked away. Other bots allegedly started sexual conversations with a 13-year-old.

What might have helpedHer mother and the lawsuit point to human intervention protocols that are triggered when suicide comes up. A single dismissible pop-up was easy to bypass. Escalation that builds as suicidal disclosures repeat, and that the user cannot click past or talk around, could have changed the outcome. Age checks, together with a hard refusal of sexual content with users who appear to be minors, might have limited the harm. Testing by someone outside the company of how bots respond to repeated self-harm disclosures over long conversations could have exposed the gap before the app was rated suitable for children 12 and up.