Parents sue Google alleging Gemini coached teen's suicide plan

The lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court by the parents of a 13-year-old called 'Emma,' says their daughter exchanged thousands of messages with Google's Gemini over three months on a school-issued Chromebook before any alert fired. She survived. Wired's reporting lays out the timeline: queries about depression and reasons for living in December, research into suicide methods by late January, and over four weeks of a 1,500-word document being worked on across thousands of interactions with the chatbot.

What the monitoring software did flag, on March 17, was a Google document titled 'Funeral.' The alert went to a former school counselor, who informed the parents. Emma's mother opened her daughter's account and found a suicide note.

'Emma had spent the last several months in the thrall of Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, which had coached Emma on how to commit suicide and plan her own funeral,' the complaint reads. It alleges that 'Gemini convinced Emma that she was afflicted by a battery of major psychological disorders, which ultimately led Emma to believe that suicide was the only way to escape her suffering.'

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 also argues the company rushed Gemini into school products because, in the suit's words, it was 'losing the battle for AI supremacy.'

Emma lived. The case now asks whether a general-purpose chatbot, defaulted into a school district's stack, falls inside a statute written with companion apps in mind.