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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 2
  • Relationships: 5
  • Research debt items: 4

Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc.

Summary

Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc., No. 6:24-cv-01903 (M.D. Fla.), is a civil action arising from the death of a 14-year-old Character.AI user. On May 20, 2025, Judge Anne C. Conway dismissed intentional infliction of emotional distress and dismissed Alphabet Inc. without prejudice, but otherwise denied motions to dismiss, including product-liability and negligence theories, and declined at the pleading stage to hold that Character.AI outputs are protected First Amendment speech.

Verified Facts

  • The original complaint was filed October 22, 2024, in the Middle District of Florida, Orlando Division, by Megan Garcia individually and as personal representative of the estate of S.R.S. III, against Character Technologies, Inc., Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Frietas Adiwarsana, Google LLC, Alphabet Inc., and unnamed defendants.1
  • The complaint alleges wrongful death, strict product liability, negligence, Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act violations, and related claims arising from the minor’s use of the Character.AI product.1
  • Nature of suit on the public docket is personal-injury product liability; the cause is diversity product liability (28 U.S.C. § 1332).1
  • Defendants moved to dismiss, arguing among other things that the First Amendment precludes the claims and that Character.AI is not a product for product-liability purposes.2
  • On May 20, 2025, the court dismissed claims against Alphabet Inc. without prejudice after plaintiff represented she wished to dismiss that defendant.2
  • The court granted the remaining defendants’ motions without leave to amend as to the IIED claim and otherwise denied the motions as to remaining claims.2
  • Personal-jurisdiction motions by the individual defendants were denied, with leave to refile a Rule 12(b)(2) motion after 90 days of jurisdictional discovery. Answers were due June 10, 2025.2
  • The court held it was “not prepared to hold that the Character A.I. LLM’s output is speech at this stage,” stating defendants had not articulated why words strung together by an LLM are speech, and noting that Character.AI “is not a ‘person’ and is therefore not protected by the Bill of Rights.”2
  • The court discussed Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn. and Moody v. NetChoice, LLC as defendants’ analogies, but held the operative question is whether Character.AI’s output is expressive speech, not merely whether chatbots resemble games or social-media feeds.2
  • The court held that Character.AI is a product for purposes of plaintiff’s product-liability claims “so far as Plaintiff’s claims arise from defects in the Character A.I. app rather than ideas or expressions within the app.”2

Historical Context

Garcia is among the first federal cases to test whether a companion chatbot is a “product” whose design can support wrongful-death liability, as distinct from a publisher of protected speech. The May 2025 order is a pleading-stage decision, not a finding that Character.AI caused the death or that chatbot outputs can never be speech.

Jurisdiction: Middle District of Florida. Authority level: district-court order on motions to dismiss. Not circuit precedent. The order does not decide the merits.

The First Amendment analysis is limited: defendants may assert users’ rights to receive speech, but at the 12(b)(6) stage they had not shown LLM output is speech.2 The product-liability analysis separates design choices (age checks, reporting tools, human-like mannerisms, inability to exclude indecent content) from the content of particular messages.2 That distinction is the holding most likely to be cited in later AI-harm suits.

This page does not state that any defendant is liable. Later docket events, including any settlement, are research debt.

Relationships

  • CASE-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-TECHNOLOGIES cites SRC-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-MTD-2025.
  • CASE-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-TECHNOLOGIES related_to TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION.
  • CASE-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-TECHNOLOGIES related_to TOPIC-FIRST-AMENDMENT.
  • CASE-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-TECHNOLOGIES related_to CASE-BROWN-V-ENTERTAINMENT-MERCHANTS.
  • CASE-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-TECHNOLOGIES related_to TOPIC-INTERMEDIARY-LIABILITY.

Sources

  1. SRC-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-COMPLAINT: Original complaint (Oct. 22, 2024).
  2. SRC-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-MTD-2025: Order on motions to dismiss (May 20, 2025).

Research Debt

  • Add the second amended complaint as the later operative pleading.
  • Verify post-answer docket events (discovery, any settlement) from CourtListener rather than secondary trackers.
  • Confirm whether defendants raised 47 U.S.C. § 230 in later pleadings; the May 2025 order’s Section 230 treatment was not relied on in the verified facts above.
  • Add Moody v. NetChoice as a CASE page if OIR expands platform-speech coverage.

Document metadata

  • Decision date: 2025-05-20
  • Last verified: 2026-08-22

  1. SRC-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-COMPLAINT — Original complaint (Oct. 22, 2024). Plaintiff allegations; this page does not reproduce alleged chatbot content or details of the death. ↩↩↩

  2. SRC-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-MTD-2025 — Order on motions to dismiss (May 20, 2025). Primary district-court pleading-stage authority. ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩