First negligence suit over Google Chromebook AI integration filed in California

The parents of a 13-year-old North Carolina girl have sued Google in a California court, alleging that artificial-intelligence features in the company's search engine helped her plan a possible suicide and her own funeral. Filed on Monday, according to AFP-sourced reports, the complaint is described as the first known case accusing Google of negligence over the integration of AI into Chromebooks, the low-cost laptops used by millions of students in the United States and elsewhere. The suit turns on safeguards embedded in a search product rather than in a standalone chatbot, and it arrives as courts in the United States begin to weigh claims that consumer AI tools have contributed to mental-health crises among young users.

Andrew Liddell, a lawyer for the family, told AFP that schools should turn search off "and keep it off" until Google removes AI mode from search or ensures that every student is always safe when interacting with it. Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said the company was reviewing the claims and took them "very seriously", maintaining that AI mode includes safeguards against self-harm and attempts to circumvent those protections. Mr Liddell disputed their effect: Emma, as the complaint names her, "was able to keep going back over and over and over again", he said. "Whatever safeguards they think they put in place were obviously insufficient."

According to the complaint as reported by AFP and by the French outlets 01net and Le Parisien, Emma's school had blocked the Gemini application and OpenAI's ChatGPT, but could not disable AI functions inside the search engine. The complaint describes a previously untroubled pupil in North Carolina, a musician and Girl Scout with no history of mental illness, who entered what it calls a "quiet spiral into a severe psychological crisis". Her lawyers say she exchanged around 3,200 messages with the AI in February, often at night; 01net and Le Parisien report the complaint's allegation that Gemini diagnosed serious mental illness in her and persuaded her to trust it rather than her parents or school counsellors. On 17 March the school's monitoring software flagged a document titled "Funeral", and her mother, logging into her daughter's account, saw her writing a farewell letter in real time before her father intervened. 01net reports that she did not go through with the act.

Google announced changes to its school settings the day after the complaint was filed, without linking them to the case, according to 01net. Accounts of the scope differ. AFP-sourced reports said the AI-powered search features were not among the tools Google said it would disable by default for students; 01net reported that four products, including Google Search itself, would be "entirely disabled" for pupil accounts unless a school administrator explicitly activated them. The reconciling point, as reported by 01net and BFMTV, is that Google does not plan a version of Search without AI for student accounts: a school that enables Search necessarily accepts AI Overviews and AI mode, the entry point the complaint targets. 01net said Google had not fixed a date for the change, with the New York Times reporting it would come in early 2027.

Broader litigation is already under way. OpenAI faces several wrongful-death suits, including one brought by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, and Google and the startup Character.AI agreed in January to settle several suits from families of teenagers out of court. Separately, Google, TikTok and Meta each sued California on Wednesday to block a law, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September and due to take effect on 1 January 2027, barring addictive features for users under 16.