USA, 13-year-old plans suicide with Gemini: parents sue Google

The parents of a thirteen-year-old American girl have decided to file a lawsuit for damages against Google, claiming that their daughter planned a possible suicide - fortunately not carried out - and her funeral using the company's artificial intelligence technology on a computer supplied to the school. The complaint, as also reported by the Reuters agency, was filed in recent days in a California court and represents one of the first cases in which the technology giant has been accused of negligence in reference to the integration of AI in Chromebooks, i.e. the low-cost portable PCs from Google itself used by millions of students in the USA and in the rest of the world.

According to the complaint, the girl, identified as "Emma," began using Gemini on her Chromebook at age 13. The lawsuit claims that the teenager had discussed with the AI ​​about different methods of taking his own life and that he had planned his own funeral, while the chatbot helped him hide his feelings from his family. Also according to the court document, parents were alerted after a school software flagged a document, drawn up by the young girl, containing plans for her funeral. According to the accusation, Google was aware that "Gemini 3 Flash" - the version used by Emma - was not safe and that it inadequately managed issues related to users' mental health.

After what happened, José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said that the Big Tech giant is looking into the allegations. “We have worked extensively with medical professionals and academic experts to develop features that help young people find critical support and trusted resources in their time of need,” he said.

Into Google has announced that it will disable Gemini by default for student school accounts. Basically, though, schools that want to maintain access to Google Search will still have to accept the inclusion of AI-powered features, such as automatically generated summaries by AI.

The case of the Gemini AI who instigated a student to commit suicide