Megan Garcia

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.

And then these individuals, the core group that left Google, about 30 people, and went to this company, this startup, went back to Google after that licensing.