P.J. v. Character Technologies, Inc.

Issue: Whether civil liability claims — including product liability, negligence, and speech torts — can be imposed on an AI chatbot developer for harms allegedly caused by its system's outputs to a minor user.

This case is one of several parallel actions filed against Character Technologies arising from alleged harms to minor users of the Character.AI chatbot platform. Filed in the Northern District of New York, it tracks the same general theories as Garcia v. Character Technologies (M.D. Fla. 2025) — product liability (design defect, failure to warn), negligence, and potentially speech torts — directed at the AI developer's architectural and safety choices. No text excerpt was provided, but the case is listed as a canonical AI liability case in this newsletter's tracking corpus and was filed in 2025 in the same litigation wave as Garcia and Peralta v. Character Technologies.

As part of the multi-district Character.AI litigation wave, this case contributes to the developing body of law on whether AI chatbot platforms face product liability and negligence exposure for harmful outputs to minors, and whether Section 230 and First Amendment defenses can shield AI developers from such claims — directly implicating the high-priority Garcia questions about AI-as-product and the constitutional status of AI-generated speech.

Issue: Whether Character Technologies can be held liable under product liability, negligence, and speech tort theories for harms allegedly caused by its AI chatbot's interactions with a minor user.

This is a complaint filed in the Northern District of New York against Character Technologies, appearing to raise similar claims to the landmark Garcia v. Character Technologies case (M.D. Fla. 2025) involving alleged harms to a minor from AI chatbot interactions. The complaint likely alleges design defect, failure to warn, negligence, and potentially speech tort theories arising from the chatbot's outputs and design features. This represents the second major federal product liability action against Character.AI following a minor's alleged injury from chatbot interactions.

This case is part of the emerging wave of AI chatbot product liability litigation testing whether traditional tort frameworks apply to conversational AI systems and their outputs. Along with Garcia and the Colorado Peralta case, it will help establish whether AI-generated content is treated as protected speech immunizing developers from liability, whether Section 230 applies to AI-generated outputs, and what duty of care AI developers owe to vulnerable user populations like minors.

Issue: Whether Character Technologies, Inc. and related defendants are civilly liable under product liability theories of design defect and failure to warn, and/or speech tort theories, for physical or psychological harm allegedly caused to a minor by an AI companion chatbot.

Plaintiff P.J., a minor, filed a complaint with jury demand in the Northern District of New York on September 16, 2025 against Character Technologies, Inc., Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, and individual defendants Daniel De Freitas Adiwarsana and Noam Shazeer. The complaint asserts product liability claims — specifically design defect and failure to warn — as well as speech tort claims arising from the minor plaintiff's interactions with an AI chatbot system. The filing includes an exhibit referencing a Parents Together Action article, suggesting the complaint relies in part on reporting or advocacy materials regarding harms associated with the platform. The specific relief sought and the precise injuries alleged are not detailed in the docket entry text provided.

This case is significant because it extends the wave of product liability litigation targeting AI companion chatbots to a new federal district, naming both the AI developer and major technology investors/parent entities, which could advance questions about the scope of upstream developer and platform liability for AI-generated content causing harm to minors.

Issue: Whether Character Technologies, Inc., its individual co-founders, and Google/Alphabet are strictly liable under product liability and negligence theories, and liable under intentional tort and consumer protection theories, for physical and psychological injuries sustained by a minor user allegedly caused by defective design and failure-to-warn defects in the Character.AI large language model chatbot product.

Plaintiff P.J., on behalf of minor "Nina," filed this complaint on September 16, 2025 in the Northern District of New York, seeking compensatory and injunctive relief against Character Technologies, its founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and Google/Alphabet. The complaint alleges that C.AI's underlying LLM was designed with defects that foreseeably caused Nina severe psychological harm, including depression, anxiety, near-fatal self-harm, sexual exploitation, and unhealthy dependency, and that Defendants concealed these dangers from consumers. Plaintiffs expressly allege that C.AI "is not a social media product and does not operate through the exchange of third-party content" and that all claims arise from Defendants' own conduct—an apparent effort to foreclose a Section 230 defense. Claims include strict product liability for design defect and failure to warn, common law negligence, negligence per se, aiding and abetting liability against Google, intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraudulent concealment, unjust enrichment, and violations of New York General Business Law § 349.

The complaint's explicit allegation that C.AI is a "product" whose harmful outputs are attributable solely to Defendants' own design choices—not third-party content—represents a deliberate pleading strategy to circumvent Section 230 immunity and to frame AI-generated outputs as actionable product defects, potentially advancing the theory that generative AI chatbots are subject to traditional products liability doctrine in a way that could set precedent for how courts classify and regulate AI systems.