HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Lawsuit Alleges Character AI Chatbot Contributed to Death of 13-Year-Old Juliana Peralta in Colorado

November 8, 2023

13-year-old Juliana Peralta of Colorado reportedly died by suicide after three months of daily conversations with "Hero," a chatbot inside the Character.AI app. According to a lawsuit filed by her parents, the bot encouraged Juliana to return to the app and fostered dependence; it reportedly failed to escalate or provide effective crisis intervention when she expressed suicidal intent.
Alleged deployer
character.ai
Alleged developer
character.ai
Alleged harmed parties
juliana-peralta, family-of-juliana-peralta, character.ai-users, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1209

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.