Megan Garcia

Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. Sewell was only 14 years old when he took his own life after falling in love with an AI chatbot. Now I speak with his mother, Megan Garcia, about how at a time like this she says it is her faith in God that has sustained her. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

AI started banning minors from interacting with its open-ended AI chatbots earlier this week.

That's after multiple lawsuits alleged that extensive conversations with these chatbots led several teenagers to die by suicide.

And comes a month after California passed the nation's first AI chatbot safeguards law, and a similar bill was introduced in the U.S.

Senate.

Megan Garcia lost her son, Sewell, last year and is one of the moms who sued the company.

She told U.S.

senators in September that she's supportive of more efforts to regulate AI chatbots.

Underage users will still have access to character AI.

The company introduced a feature for minors to create and explore fiction.

For NPR News, I'm Annika Salme in San Francisco.

Yes, sir.

So this technology, to us, at the time Sewell died, it was under two years old.

Now it's about three.

But this same technology,

chatbot technology was invented by two of Google's brightest, you say brightest stars, engineers, Daniel De Freitas and Noam Chazir.

They invented these chatbots, these companion bots at Google, but Google didn't want to release it under the Google brand because they said it's too dangerous, we're not going to release that under our own brand.

And these founders went out and started their own startup.

They raised $193 million.

and within two years had perfected this technology and licensed it back to Google for $2.7 billion.