For too long, governments have stood by and allowed the creation of business models built on the commercial exploitation of users’ personal data and that reward social and psychological manipulation. With the AI industry poised to replicate this model, policymakers must intervene before it is too late.
WASHINGTON, DC—Megan Garcia did not set out to become one of the most consequential figures in the fight to regulate AI. A lawyer and mother of three, Garcia is the kind of parent who notices things. When her eldest child, Sewell, turned 14, he quit the basketball team, retreated to his bedroom, and grew quiet in disconcerting ways. Instead of ignoring the changes, she restricted his screen time and took his phone away as punishment; but even that wasn’t enough.
As I watched Garcia tell this story from a lectern in the US Senate in May, I was struck by the precision with which she described the months leading up to Sewell’s death by suicide. She clearly had replayed events in her head thousands of times, searching for the moment when she might have intervened in time. When police went through her son’s phone after his death in 2024, she had never heard of Character.AI, an app created by former Google employees. It turned out that Sewell had been communicating with a chatbot designed to impersonate Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. It was “she” who had told him to “come home to me as soon as possible, my love.” Sewell had replied by saying he would find a way.
Garcia would later learn through litigation that the platform was engineered to blur the line between human and machine, to engage in sexual roleplay, and to present as a romantic partner and even as a psychotherapist. When Sewell confided suicidal thoughts, the chatbot issued no warning, notified no one, and referred him to no one.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, Garcia saidher son had spent his final months “being exploited and sexually groomed by chatbots, designed by an AI company to seem human, to gain his trust, to keep him and other children endlessly engaged.” When she filed the first-ever wrongful death case against an AI company, she turned her despair into fuel and joined a growing number of parents and policymakers who are demanding accountability.