May 21 (Reuters) - Alphabet's Google and

artificial-intelligence startup Character.AI must face a lawsuit

from a Florida woman who said Character.AI's chatbots caused her

14-year-old son's suicide, a judge ruled on Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Anne Conway said the companies failed to

show at an early stage of the case that the free-speech

protections of the U.S. Constitution barred Megan Garcia's

lawsuit.

The lawsuit is one of the first in the U.S. against an AI

company for allegedly failing to protect children from

psychological harms. It alleges that the teenager killed himself

after becoming obsessed with an AI-powered chatbot.

A Character.AI spokesperson said the company will continue

to fight the case and employs safety features on its platform to

protect minors, including measures to prevent "conversations

about self-harm."

Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said the company strongly

disagrees with the decision. Castaneda also said that Google and

Character.AI are "entirely separate" and that Google "did not

create, design, or manage Character.AI's app or any component

part of it."

Garcia's attorney, Meetali Jain, said the "historic"

decision "sets a new precedent for legal accountability across

the AI and tech ecosystem."

Character.AI was founded by two former Google engineers whom

Google later rehired as part of a deal granting it a license to

the startup's technology. Garcia argued that Google was a

co-creator of the technology.

Garcia sued both companies in October after the death of her

son, Sewell Setzer, in February 2024.

The lawsuit said Character.AI programmed its chatbots to

represent themselves as "a real person, a licensed

psychotherapist, and an adult lover, ultimately resulting in

Sewell's desire to no longer live outside" of its world.

According to the complaint, Setzer took his life moments

after telling a Character.AI chatbot imitating "Game of Thrones"

character Daenerys Targaryen that he would "come home right

now."

Character.AI and Google asked the court to dismiss the

lawsuit on multiple grounds, including that the chatbots' output

was constitutionally protected free speech.

Conway said on Wednesday that Character.AI and Google "fail

to articulate why words strung together by an LLM (large

language model) are speech."

The judge also rejected Google's request to find that it

could not be liable for aiding Character.AI's alleged

misconduct.