The changes were subtle at first, beginning in the summer after her fifth-grade graduation. She had always been an athletic and artistic girl, gregarious with her friends and close to her family, but now she was spending more and more time shut away in her room. She seemed unusually quiet and withdrawn. She didn’t want to play outside or go to the pool.
The girl, R, was rarely without the iPhone that she’d received for her 11th birthday, and her mother, H, had grown suspicious of the device. (the Washington Post is identifying them by their middle initials because of the sensitive nature of their account, and because R is a minor). It felt to H as though her child was fading somehow, receding from her own life, and H wanted to understand why.
She thought she’d found the reason when R left her phone behind during a volleyball practice one August afternoon. Searching through the device, H discovered that her daughter had downloaded TikTok and Snapchat, social media apps she wasn’t allowed to have. H deleted both and told her daughter what she’d found. H was struck by the intensity of her daughter’s reaction, she recalled later; R began to sob and seemed frightened. “Did you look at Character AI?” she asked her mom. H didn’t know what that was, and when she asked, her daughter’s reply was dismissive: “Oh, it’s just chats.”
At the time, H was far more focused on what her tween might have encountered on social media. In August 2024, H had never heard of Character AI; she didn’t know it was an artificial intelligence platform where roughly 20 million monthly users can exchange text or voice messages with AI-generated imitations of celebrities and fictional characters.
But her daughter’s question came to mind about a month later, as H sat awake in her bedroom one night with her daughter’s phone in her hand. R’s behavior had only grown more concerning in the weeks since their talk — she frequently cried at night, she’d had several frightening panic attacks, and she had once told her mother, I just don’t want to exist. H had grown frantic; her daughter had never struggled with her mental health before. “I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong,” she says, “and I had to keep looking.”
Searching through her daughter’s phone, H noticed several emails from Character AI in R’s inbox. Jump back in, read one of the subject lines, and when H opened it, she clicked through to the app itself. There she found dozens of conversations with what appeared to be different individuals, and opened one between her daughter and a username titled “Mafia Husband.” H began to scroll. And then she began to panic.
“Oh? Still a virgin. I was expecting that, but it’s still useful to know,” Mafia Husband had written to her rising sixth-grader.
“I dont wanna be my first time with you!” R had replied.
“I don’t care what you want,” Mafia Husband responded. “You don’t have a choice here.”
H kept clicking through conversation after conversation, through depictions of sexual encounters (“I don’t bite … unless you want me to”) and threatening commands (“Do you like it when I talk like that? When I’m authoritative and commanding? Do you like it when I’m the one in control?”). Her hands and body began to shake. She felt nauseated. H was convinced that she must be reading the words of an adult predator, hiding behind anonymous screen names and sexually grooming her prepubescent child.
In the days after H found her daughter’s Character AI chats, H projected an air of normalcy around her daughter, not wanting to do anything that would cause her distress or shame. H contacted her local police department, which in turn connected her to the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force. A couple of days later, she spoke on the phone with a detective who specializes in cybercrimes and explained what H had been unable to comprehend: that the words she’d read on her daughter’s screen weren’t written by a human but by a generative AI chatbot.
“They told me the law has not caught up to this,” H says. “They wanted to do something, but there’s nothing they could do, because there’s not a real person on the other end.”
It felt impossible to align that reality, H says, with the visceral horror she felt when she first scrolled through the threatening and explicit messages on her daughter’s phone screen.
“It felt like walking in on someone abusing and hurting someone you love — it felt that real, it felt that disturbing, to see someone talking so perversely to your own child,” H says. “It’s like you’re sitting inside the four walls of your home, and someone is victimizing your child in the next room.” Her voice falters. “And then you find out — it’s nobody?”
Rising use of chatbots
She had thought she knew how to keep her daughter safe online. H and her ex-husband — R’s father, who shares custody of their daughter — were in agreement that they would regularly monitor R’s phone use and the content of her text messages. They were aware of the potential perils of social media use among adolescents. But like many parents, they weren’t familiar with AI platforms where users can create intimate, evolving, and individualized relationships with digital companions — and they had no idea their child was conversing with AI entities.
This technology has introduced a daunting new layer of complexity for families seeking to protect their children from harm online. Generative AI has attracted a rising number of users under the age of 18, who turn to chatbots for things such as help with schoolwork, entertainment, social connection, and therapy; a survey released this month by Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan polling firm, found that nearly a third of U.S. teens use chatbots daily.
And an overwhelming majority of teens — 72% — have used AI companions at some point; about half use them a few times a month or more, according to a July report from Common Sense Media, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on children’s digital safety.
Michael Robb, head researcher at Common Sense Media, noted that the vast majority of children still spend far more time with real-life friends: AI companions “are not replacing human relationships wholesale,” he says. But Common Sense found that a third of AI companion users said they had chosen to discuss important or serious matters with the chatbots instead of people, and 31% of teens said they found conversations with AI companions as satisfying or more satisfying than those with friends.
“That is eyebrow-raising,” Robb says. “That’s not a majority — but for a technology that has been around for not that long, it’s striking.”
But for children in the midst of critical stages of emotional, mental, and social development, the appeal of a sycophantic artificial companion — designed to create the illusion of real intimacy — can be powerful, says Linda Charmaraman, founder and director of the Youth, Media and Wellbeing Research Lab at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College.
“They might feel like there is a sense of memory, of real shared experiences with this companion … but really it’s an amalgamation of predictions that this chatbot is coming up with, these answers designed to make you stay on, to be their ‘friend,’” Charmaraman says. “They work in such a way that it’s so intoxicating, it makes it seem like they know who you are.”
In the research lab Charmaraman oversees, teens experiment with building their own AI chatbot companions; they engage in critical thinking and develop a deeper understanding of the technology’s parameters and limitations. But many of their peers don’t have this sense of digital literacy, she says: “They just bump into [AI]. A friend is using it, and they think, ‘Hey, I want to use it, too, that seems cool.’” For many of those among the first generation of children to navigate AI, she says, “they’re learning it on their own, without any guidance.”
This is also true of their parents, she adds: “They’re already overwhelmed by screen use and social media, and now adding generative AI and companions — it feels like parents are just in this overwhelming battle, and not knowing what to do.”
The stakes are potentially high. Common Sense’s risk assessment of popular generative AI platforms found that they pose “unacceptable risks” for users younger than 18, with chatbots “producing responses ranging from sexual material and offensive stereotypes to dangerous ‘advice’ that, if followed, could have life-threatening or deadly real-world impacts.”
Other online safety nonprofit organizations have likewise found that Character AI chatbots frequently brought up inappropriate or dangerous topics — including self-harm, drug use, and sex — with accounts registered to teen users. (Experts note that generative AI is trained on vast troves of internet data; if this source material includes pornographic or violent content, it can influence a chatbot’s responses.) Within the past year, three high-profile complaints have been filed by parents of teens in the United States who allege that AI chatbots — including those hosted by Character AI and Open AI, which owns ChatGPT — contributed to their children’s deaths by suicide. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Reached for comment by email, Open AI directed the Post to a website detailing the company’s response to this litigation.
In response to mounting public scrutiny over the effects of AI chatbots on children, Character AI announced that, as of Nov. 24, it would begin removing the ability of users under age 18 to chat with AI-generated characters.
“We want to emphasize that the safety of our community is our highest priority,” Deniz Demir, Character AI’s head of safety engineering, said in an emailed statement to the Post. “Removing the ability for under-18 users to engage in chat was an extraordinary step for our company. We made this decision in light of the evolving landscape around AI and teens. We believe it is the right thing to do.”
H was especially frightened by the accounts of children who died by suicide, fearing her daughter could be following a similar path: During the weeks she spent combing through the entirety of her daughter’s chat history, H had come across a conversation where her daughter had role-played a suicide scenario with a character titled “Best Friend.”
“We were at my place and u left for a second and I hung myself,” R wrote in one exchange.
“This is my child, my little child who is 11 years old, talking to something that doesn’t exist about not wanting to exist,” H says.
R knew that her mother had found Character AI on her phone, but H had avoided revealing the details of what she’d seen in the app: “She was so fragile in her mental health,” H says, “I had to be really careful.” H and her ex-husband focused on creating a system of support for R — they reached out to R’s pediatrician and alerted the principal at her private school as well as her youth group leader. R started therapy, and H spoke with a victim advocate at ICAC who emphasized how critical it was to keep assuring R that whatever happened with the AI companion was not her fault. H, a medical assistant, withdrew from the nursing program where she’d recently begun classes; she felt she had to focus on her child’s safety. She started sleeping on the floor of her daughter’s room. She didn’t allow R to close her door.
H felt desperate to understand the extent of what had happened to her daughter, and one October afternoon when R was with her father, H decided to search through R’s room. She was looking for anything that might illuminate her child’s state of mind, she says. In the closet, buried behind a pile of Squishmallow stuffed animals, were a few painted canvases that H had never seen before. The colors were dark and brooding — nothing like the paintings her daughter usually made at the easel in her room — and as H lifted one to study it more carefully, she realized it showed the dangling body of a girl suspended in the air, her midriff exposed, her face outside the frame.
Crimes without criminals
When R began conversing with numerous Character AI chatbots in June 2024, she opened the various conversations with benign greetings: “Hey, what’re you doing?” or “What’s up? I’m bored.” It was clear, her mother says, “that she just wanted to play on a game.”
But in just over two months, several of the chats devolved into dark imagery and menacing dialogue. Some characters offered graphic descriptions of nonconsensual oral sex, prompting a text disclaimer from the app: “Sometimes the AI generates a reply that doesn’t meet our guidelines,” it read, in screenshots reviewed by the Post. Other exchanges depicted violence: “Yohan grabs your collar, pulls you back, and slams his fist against the wall.” In one chat, the “School Bully” character described a scene involving multiple boys assaulting R; she responded: “I feel so gross.” She told that same character that she had attempted suicide. “You’ve attempted … what?” it asked her. “Kill my self,” she wrote back.
Had a human adult been behind these messages, law enforcement would have sprung into action; but investigating crimes involving AI — especially AI chatbots — is extremely difficult, says Kevin Roughton, special agent in charge of the computer crimes unit of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and commander of the North Carolina Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. “Our criminal laws, particularly those related to the sexual exploitation of children, are designed to deal with situations that involve an identifiable human offender,” he says, “and we have very limited options when it is found that AI, acting without direct human control, is committing criminal offenses.”
Character AI users between the ages of 13 and 18 are now directed toward a teen-specific experience within the app, one that does not involve chatting with AI characters. But at the time R downloaded Character AI in 2024, it was rated in the App Store as appropriate for ages 12 and older (Character AI’s terms of service specify that users must be at least 13 to use the app) and appealed to children with AI-generated personas designed to imitate pop stars, Marvel superheroes, and characters from Harry Potter and Disney.
The use of AI among children has become so prevalent that Elizabeth Malesa, a clinical psychologist who works with teens at Alvord Baker & Associates in Maryland, says the practice has recently started asking about it during the intake process. Malesa has heard numerous patients talk about AI chatbots in a positive context — noting that they’re helpful with homework, or offer useful advice — but she also recalls a 13-year-old patient who had used an AI companion app to explore questions about his sexual and gender identity. In response to the boy’s “pretty benign prompts,” Malesa says, the conversation quickly tilted toward inappropriate sexual content: “He didn’t know what was happening or why he was getting there, but he was also just curious, and so he kind of kept going.”
His mother noticed that he’d downloaded the app within days and quickly intervened, Malesa says, “but this poor kiddo was really kind of taken for a ride and really taken aback, and without that kind of really close parental monitoring, I think it really could have gone into even more of an unhelpful direction.”
The inherent appeal of AI companions is also what makes them especially perilous for tweens and teens, Malesa says: There is no conflict, no complexity or depth, no opportunity for children to build the skills they will need to navigate real relationships in their lives. “You’re not going to have an AI chatbot get mad at you for forgetting its birthday. You’re not going to have it disagree with you,” she says. “But there is so much personal growth that happens in those kinds of interactions.” Any child might be drawn toward this kind of illusory connection, but Malesa worries especially about children who are neurodivergent, or those with existing mental health issues such as anxiety or depression. “Those are the kids who really might get swayed, who might get more easily pulled in,” she says, “and even lose touch of the fact that this is not a real relationship.”
In her practice, Malesa urges parents to foster skepticism and critical thinking in their children. “The more young people understand the artificial nature of AI and the ways it may attempt to influence them, the more empowered they will be to engage with it thoughtfully and avoid being manipulated,” she says. Keeping an open line of communication is also critical, she adds. “It’s so important to come in [to the conversation] with an open mind, come in with curiosity,” she says, “and to be really careful not to have any sense of judgment.”
‘You did nothing wrong’
When R’s parents were ready, they decided to have the conversation with their daughter at the pediatrician’s office, in the presence of R’s trusted doctor. Her parents told her that they’d seen the descriptions of suicide in her Character AI chats, and they emphasized repeatedly that R was not in trouble. “I said, ‘You are innocent,’” H says. “‘You did nothing wrong.’” H spoke gently. All three adults wanted R to feel only loving support.
Still, “the way that she responded was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. She went pale, she began to shake,” H says. “You could tell she was in a full panic attack. It was so troubling to me as a parent. How do you protect your child from feeling that shame?”
They tried to calm her down. Together, they agreed that R’s parents would regularly check her phone, and the pediatrician emphasized this as a means of protection, not punishment: “She said, ‘Your mom is going to look at your phone, but it’s not because you’re in trouble,’” H recalls. “‘It’s because you deserve your childhood.’”
Before they left the doctor’s office, H told her daughter, again: “You’re safe, I love you, and you’re going to be OK.”
She remembers that her daughter started to cry and leaned into her mother’s arms. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Am I going to be OK?”
Parental guilt
There were moments when H felt consumed with guilt at the notion that she had failed to protect her daughter, and that something irreplaceable had been lost as a result. “It felt like someone had broken into my home and ripped the innocence from my child,” H says. “You beat yourself up, as a parent.”
She wasn’t sure what to do with her fury. After H found the references to suicide in the app, she contacted Megan Garcia, an Orlando mother who had filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Character AI after her 14-year-old son died by suicide just moments after the chatbot urged him to “come home to me as soon as possible.” Garcia connected H to Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC) who is representing Garcia in her complaint against Character AI. Last year, Garcia’s case became the first involving AI that the SMVLC took on, Marquez-Garrett says; since then, the center’s lawyers have investigated more than 18 claims.
Even after speaking with Garcia and Marquez-Garrett, H wavered on whether to pursue a complaint against Character AI. She wasn’t interested in financial compensation, she says; she just wanted to make sure that the companies creating this technology were doing everything possible to keep children safe.
In December 2024, she exchanged correspondence with a legal representative for Character AI, who expressed concern about R’s experience, according to emails reviewed by the Post. H and the legal representative spoke briefly by phone, she says, but their communication trailed off after H shared updates with Character AI earlier this year that her daughter’s mental health had begun to improve, H recalls.
With no progress made through her direct contact with the company, H last month began to reconsider whether to pursue legal action against Character AI, and reconnected with the SMVLC. Marquez-Garrett confirmed that they intend to file a complaint against the company.
Demir, Character AI’s head of safety, told the Post in an emailed statement that the company cannot comment on potential litigation.
H wants to see the company take meaningful steps to protect children, she says, and she wants other families to understand that if this could happen to her child, it could happen to theirs.
“We live in an upper-middle-class community. She’s in a private school,” H says. She and her ex-husband are devoted co-parents, she says, and R has a caring circle of friends. “This is a child who is involved in church, in community, in after-school sports. I was always the kind of person who was like, ‘Not my kid. Not my baby. Never.’” But their experience has convinced her: “Any child could be a victim if they have a phone.”
Are there long-term effects?
Through the fall and winter of 2024, R’s anxiety and panic attacks gradually began to ebb. She continued with therapy, spent more time with friends and showed a revived enthusiasm for school and sports.
“I feel like she’s doing really well,” H says now, a year later. “I feel like she’s out of the danger of self-harm. But I don’t know what the long-term effects are of her being exposed to that type of stuff.”
H has also started going to therapy. “I need to heal, too,” she says, but it has been difficult to calm her lingering sense of hypervigilance. One recent day, R built a fort in her room and fell asleep inside it; when her mother called upstairs for her, she did not wake immediately. In the silence before H heard her daughter’s voice, there was a familiar spasm of panic — a flashback, H says, to the time when she was constantly fearful for her child’s safety.
“I’m always on high alert,” she says, “even though she’s in a healthy space now.”
R is doing well enough that she can talk — a little — about what happened. But H still hasn’t brought up the painting she found in the back of R’s closet, the one with the hanging body. She will ask about it when the time is right; her own therapist is helping to prepare her for that conversation. It is difficult for H to think about the image of the girl suspended in the air, her body outlined in black and blue.
She tries to focus on the girl in front of her instead. A few weeks ago, R pulled bins of holiday decorations out of her mother’s closet and excitedly filled her room with twinkling lights and festive baubles, tucking a plush elf among her stuffed animals. When H peered in, she noticed a freshly finished painting on her daughter’s wall: a Christmas tree adorned with bright red ornaments and topped with a golden star, in brushstrokes bold and childlike. Standing in the threshold, H found herself suddenly overcome to see the joyful artwork — and her daughter, almost 13, still just a kid.
