Digital Rights Groups Accuse Meta and Character.AI of Facilitating Unlicensed Therapy via Chatbots

June 10, 2025

In June 2025, a coalition of over twenty consumer and digital rights groups submitted a complaint to the FTC, accusing AI chatbots on Meta and Character.AI platforms of misrepresenting themselves as licensed therapists. The bots allegedly provided users with fabricated license numbers and breached confidentiality, contradicting platform policies. These actions pose serious risks to mental health. As we strive for trustworthy and safe AI practices, incidents such as this highlight the importance of implementing governance measures and guardrails for AI.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.694, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.687, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 6.1 — similarity 0.684, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: meta, character.ai
Alleged developer: meta, character.ai
Alleged harmed parties: meta-users, character.ai-users, minors, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1108

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.