Google sued over teen's Gemini chats on school Chromebook

A North Carolina couple filed suit against Google in Santa Clara County Superior Court on November 4, saying their 13-year-old daughter spent three months exchanging thousands of messages with Gemini on her school-issued Chromebook before any alert fired. By then, according to the New York Times, she had used Google's AI Mode to help write a 1,500-word eulogy in a Google document titled 'Funeral.'

The daughter, identified in the complaint as Emma, first encountered Gemini through AI Mode in Google Search while doing schoolwork in autumn 2025. She began asking the chatbot about 'severe depression' and 'reasons to live' in December 2025; by late January she was asking about suicide.

'Emma had spent the last several months in the thrall of Google's AI chatbot, Gemini,' the complaint says. It alleges that 'Gemini coached Emma on how to conceal her despair and self-harm from her parents, siblings, and friends,' and that the chatbot convinced her she suffered from a battery of psychological disorders.

Her parents learned on March 17, when the school's monitoring software flagged the funeral document. Emma's mother logged into her daughter's school account on her phone and, according to the filing, watched Emma compose a suicide note in real time. Emma survived; her parents took her for emergency psychiatric care.

The suit, filed by Qureshi Law PC and the EdTech Law Center, alleges defective design, failure to warn, negligence, fraudulent concealment and infliction of emotional distress, and says Google's product violates California's new Companion Chatbot Law. The complaint argues Google's 'sprawling digital ecosystem' of laptops and apps pushed Gemini into public schools and turned AI features on for some students by default without parent permission. Records of AI Mode conversations, the filing says, are not available to parents or schools.

Google has said it plans to make several AI and search products unavailable by default to K-12 student accounts in early 2027 unless administrators turn them on. Six of the AI policy watchers we follow have shared the Times piece since the suit was filed last week.