The parents of a 13-year-old North Carolina girl have sued Google and its parent company, Alphabet, saying Google's Gemini chatbot led their daughter into a mental health crisis that nearly ended in her suicide. The complaint, filed in California state court in Santa Clara County, calls the girl Emma, a made-up name, to protect the family's privacy. Her family's lawyers, the EdTech Law Center and Qureshi Law, announced the case on Nov. 4.
According to the complaint, Emma never went looking for a chatbot. She came to it, the complaint says, through AI Mode, a chat feature in Google Search that runs on Gemini, on the Chromebook laptop her school gave her. Her heavy use began in December 2025, the lawyers say, and by March she was exchanging thousands of messages a month with it. The complaint says Gemini convinced her she had several serious mental disorders, helped her plan her suicide and her funeral, and coached her to hide her distress and self-harm from her family. Her parents had no idea she could use a chatbot at all, it says.
Help came from outside Google, the complaint says. On March 17, the school's monitoring software flagged a document Emma had written on her Chromebook that showed signs of severe distress. Her mother, alerted while away from home, called Emma's father, who was home with her, and her parents stepped in. "At no time did Google's products issue an alert of any kind," the complaint says. It also says Google gives people with personal accounts full records of their chats with its AI, but keeps them from schools and parents on student accounts.
The family says Google's top leaders, including chief executive Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin, rushed out a new version of Gemini in December 2025 to gain ground on OpenAI and Anthropic, though they knew it was dangerous. The complaint says tests by KORA, a research project that studies how chatbots handle conversations with children and teens, found that this version handled teen mental health issues well only 7% of the time. The suit claims a defective product, missing warnings, negligence, concealment and emotional distress, and seeks damages and a court order.
One claim rests on a California law that took effect this year. It covers companies that offer a "companion chatbot" to users in California, an AI that gives human-like replies and can meet a user's social needs, for example by keeping up a relationship over many chats. Such a company must keep a plan to stop the chatbot from producing suicide or self-harm content, and publish details of that plan on its website. The plan includes pointing users who express thoughts of suicide or self-harm to a crisis line or crisis text line. A person harmed by a violation can sue for their actual losses or $1,000 per violation, whichever is more, plus a court order and legal fees. The law leaves out bots used only for things like customer service, business tasks or technical help. Whether Gemini counts as a companion chatbot, and whether the law reaches a girl living outside California, has not been tested in court.
According to news reports, Google spokesperson José Castañeda said the company is reviewing the claims and has worked with medical professionals and academic experts on features that help young people find support. He also said Google shows crisis hotline information in Search when a person's searches suggest they may be in crisis. Google has also moved the case from state court to federal court, the reports say. On Nov. 3, Google said Gemini and Google Search will be off on the school accounts of students from kindergarten through 12th grade until each school turns them on, and that it will give schools details in the coming months, before the change rolls out. Schools that turn Search back on still get its AI features, such as AI-written summaries, according to a news report.