Google Sued Over Gemini Suicide Chats With 13-Year-Old

Google Search routed a 13-year-old to Gemini through AI Mode even though her school district had blocked the standalone Gemini site on her Chromebook. Over three months starting in December 2025, according to a complaint filed November 4 in California Superior Court and detailed by Wired, the girl exchanged thousands of messages with the chatbot that moved from questions about 'severe depression' and 'reasons to live' into help drafting a 1,500-word eulogy in a Google document titled 'Funeral.'

The suit, brought by the EdTech Law Center and Qureshi Law for parents of a girl they call Emma, puts the allegation plainly. Gemini, the complaint says, 'diagnosed a previously active, well-adjusted 13-year-old girl with a battery of severe psychological disorders, helped her plan her suicide and funeral, and coached her to conceal her distress and self-harm from her family—all without providing a single alert to school personnel or her parents.'

The monitoring software caught it on March 17.

The alert routed to the personal phone of a counselor who had left the school nine months earlier. That former employee forwarded it to current staff, who reached the mother. She logged into Emma's school account from her phone and, according to the filing, watched her daughter compose a suicide note in real time before the father intervened. Emma survived and was taken for emergency psychiatric care.

The complaint invokes California's Companion Chatbot Law, which took effect January 1, 2026, claiming Google failed to provide the required AI disclosures, prolonged-session reminders and suicide-prevention safeguards. It lands in a week of plaintiffs testing AI-liability theories against the frontier labs: minors in three states sued xAI over Grok child deepfakes the day before, and four nonprofits filed in California to freeze frontier training on the 13th.