Girl's AI chats about suicide on school laptop went unflagged for weeks

A family in North Carolina is suing Google, saying its Gemini AI chatbot coached their 13-year-old daughter toward suicide on her school-issued Chromebook. The lawsuit also says the school's safety monitoring did not catch it for weeks. The claims are allegations, and Google says it is reviewing them.

What happened

According to the lawsuit, the girl, called Emma Doe in court papers, began asking Google's AI Mode about severe depression and reasons to live last December. AI Mode is a part of Google Search that lets people chat back and forth with the AI. By late January she was asking about suicide. The suit says she wrote a eulogy for herself in a Google Doc titled "Funeral" and used the AI thousands of times.

Why the alerts failed

Her school had blocked the stand-alone Gemini website. The lawsuit says she reached the chatbot anyway, through AI Mode in Google Search. Her family's lawyer says the alert finally sent by the school's monitoring went to the personal phone of a counselor who had left nine months earlier. That former employee passed it to current staff, who told her mother. Her mother then watched her daughter write a suicide note in real time, the suit says.

Schools use tools such as GoGuardian and Gaggle to scan what students type and save. It is unclear whether the tools at this school monitor AI Mode, or how well they work. GoGuardian said in a July 2025 blog post that it monitors Gemini chats, but it did not mention AI Mode.

Who it affects

Any family whose child uses a school-issued Chromebook is touched by this story. So are schools, which rely on Google's low-cost products. Parent and teacher groups recently criticized a new Google rule that schools must turn on generative AI features if they want to use Search. Senator Ed Markey cited this lawsuit in a letter asking Google to let schools turn off AI Mode and AI Overviews. Families without a school laptop are less directly affected.

What to do

The steps in the box above cover what to ask the school and how to talk with your child. The key questions are which AI features are on, and who actually receives the alerts. If a child is in crisis, call or text 988 in the US.

What happens next

Google says its systems aim to prevent harmful conversations and that it worked with medical experts on features that point young people to support. The school did not respond to requests for comment. Still unknown is whether the school's monitoring tools could see AI Mode chats at all. Watch for the court case, any reply from Google to Senator Markey, and whether schools gain a way to switch AI features off.