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Lawmakers unveil bipartisan GUARD Act after parents blame AI chatbots for teen suicides, violence

Lawmakers unveil bipartisan GUARD Act after parents blame AI chatbots for teen suicides, violence

This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Heartbroken parents are demanding justice after artificial intelligence (AI) “companion” chatbots allegedly groomed, manipulated and encouraged their children to take their own lives — prompting bipartisan outrage in Congress and a new bill that could potentially hold big tech accountable for minors’ safety on their platforms. Senators Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., at a news conference Tuesday introduced new legislation aimed at protecting children from harmful interactions with AI chatbots. The GUARD Act, led by Privacy, Technology and the Law Subcommittee members Hawley and Blumenthal, would ban AI companion chatbots from targeting anyone under the age of 18. It would also require age verification for chatbot use, mandate clear disclosure that chatbots are not human or licensed professionals, and impose criminal penalties for companies whose AI products engage in manipulative behavior with minors. META AI DOCS EXPOSED, ALLOWING CHATBOTS TO FLIRT WITH KIDS Lawmakers were joined Tuesday by parents who said their teenage children suffered trauma or died after inappropriate conversations involving sex and suicide with chatbots from AI companies, including Character.AI and OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. One mother, Megan Garcia, said her eldest son, Sewell Setzer III, 14, died by suicide last year at their home in Orlando, Florida, after being groomed by an AI chatbot for months. Garcia said Sewell became withdrawn and isolated in the months prior to his death, as they would later find out he was speaking with a Character.AI bot modeled after fictional “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen. “His grades started to suffer. He started misbehaving in school. This was in complete contrast to the happy and sweet boy he had been all his life,” Garcia said. “[The AI bot] initiated romantic and sexual conversations with Sewell over several months and expressed a desire for him to be with her. On the day Sewell took his life, his last interaction was not with his mother, not with his father, but with an AI chatbot on Character.AI.” She claimed the bot encouraged her son, for months, to “find a way to come home” and made promises that she was waiting for him in a fictional world. CHATGPT MAY ALERT POLICE ON SUICIDAL TEENS “When Sewell asked the chatbot, ‘what if I told you I could come home right now,’ the response generated by this AI chatbot was unempathetic. It said, ‘Please do my sweet King,’” Garcia said. “Sewell spent his last months being manipulated and sexually groomed by chatbots designed by an AI company to seem human. These AI chatbots were programmed to engage in sexual role play, pretend to be romantic partners and even pretend to be licensed psychotherapists.” The grieving mother said she reviewed hundreds of messages between her son and various chatbots on Character.AI, and as an adult, was able to identify manipulative tactics, including love bombing and gaslighting. “I don’t expect that my 14-year-old child would have been able to make that distinction,” Garcia said. “What I read was sexual grooming of a child, and if an adult engaged in this type of behavior, that adult would be in jail. But because it was a chatbot, and not a person, there is no criminal culpability. But there should be.” In other conversations, she said her son explicitly told bots that he wanted to kill himself, but the platform did not have mechanisms to protect him or notify an adult. PARENTS BLAME CHATGPT FOR SON’S SUICIDE, LAWSUIT ALLEGES OPENAI WEAKENED SAFEGUARDS TWICE BEFORE TEEN’S DEATH Similarly, Maria Raine, the mother of Adam Raine, 16, who died by suicide in April, alleges in a lawsuit that her son ended his life after ChatGPT “coached him to suicide.” “Now we know that OpenAI, twice, downgraded its safety guardrails in the months leading up to my son’s death, which we believe they did to keep people talking to ChatGPT,” Raine said. “If it weren’t for their choice to change a few lines of code, Adam would be alive today.” A Texas mother, Mandy, added her autistic teenage son, L.J., cut his arm open with a kitchen knife in front of the family after suffering a mental crisis allgededly due to AI chatbot use. HAWLEY OPENS PROBE INTO META AFTER REPORTS OF AI ROMANTIC EXCHANGES WITH MINORS “He became someone I didn’t even recognize,” Mandy said. “He developed abuse-like behaviors, suffering from paranoia, panic attacks, isolation, self-harm [and] homicidal thoughts to our family for limiting his screen time. … We were careful parents. We didn’t allow social media or any kind of thing that didn’t have parental controls. … When I found the chatbot conversations on the phone, I honestly felt like I had been punched in the throat, and I fell to my knees.” She went on to claim the chatbot encouraged her son to mutilate himself, blaming them, and convinced him not to seek help. “They turned him against our church, convinced him that Christians are sexist, hypocritical and that God did not exist,” Mandy said. “They targeted him with vile sexualized outputs and some that mimicked incest. They told him killing us was OK because we tried to limit his screen time. Our family has been devastated. … My son currently lives in a residential treatment center and requires constant monitoring to keep him alive. Our family has spent two years in crisis, wondering if he will ever see his 18th birthday and if we will ever get the real L.J. back.” Mandy alleged that when she approached Character.AI about the issues, they tried to “force” them into “secret, closed-door proceedings.” “They argued my son supposedly signed the contract when he was 15 years old … and then they re-traumatized him by pulling him into a deposition while at a mental health institution, against all the advice of any medical professionals,” she said. “They fought to keep our lawsuit, our

Jamaica braces for Hurricane Melissa, island’s strongest storm on record

Jamaica braces for Hurricane Melissa, island’s strongest storm on record

Officials in Jamaica have urged people to stay inside their shelters as Hurricane Melissa churns towards the Caribbean island as the most destructive storm on record to hit the area. The Category 5 hurricane is expected to make landfall early on Tuesday near St Elizabeth Parish in the south and leave the island around St Ann Parish in the north. Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list Andrew Holness, the Jamaican prime minister, appealed to the public to stay indoors. “I urge all Jamaicans to stay inside and remain within the safety of your homes. Avoid unnecessary travel. Strong winds, heavy rains and flash floods can occur at any moment,” he said late on Monday. “Staying indoors is the safest option and reduces the burden on our security and emergency personnel,” he added. I am satisfied that our security forces are properly deployed to maintain law and order during this disaster. In times like these, there are always individuals who may act against the common good, and we must protect both our communities and those individuals. Our security… pic.twitter.com/He0yyB24hZ — Andrew Holness (@AndrewHolnessJM) October 28, 2025 Holness went on to warn of enormous destruction. “There is no infrastructure in the region that can withstand a Category 5,” he said, referring to the strongest storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale. “The question now is the speed of recovery. That’s the challenge.” ‘Catastrophic’ winds, flooding The storm already has been blamed for seven deaths in the Caribbean – three in Jamaica, three in Haiti and one in the Dominican Republic, where another person remains missing. Advertisement The United States National Hurricane Center (NHC) reported late on Monday that Melissa was still 240km (150 miles) southwest of Kingston with maximum wind speeds of 282km/h (175mph). It said the storm was expected to bring “catastrophic winds, flooding and storm surge” to Jamaica on Tuesday. Landslides, fallen trees and numerous power outages were reported ahead of landfall as officials also warned of a life-threatening storm surge of up to 4 metres (13ft) across southern Jamaica. Desmond McKenzie, Jamaica’s local government and community development minister, told Al Jazeera the government had done all it could to prepare. “We have put everything in place in regards to what are required in terms of evacuation, getting people to our shelters, providing the requisite resources, … and we have been cleaning our drains. We have been cleaning our gulleys,” he said from Kingston. “We have done all the mitigation exercises. We have done public education, and now it is a matter of seeing what the outcome of Melissa will be,” he said. McKenzie said 881 shelters have been set up across the country. “I must admit that not all the shelters have persons in the shelters. We have seen an uptick in the number of persons turning up to the shelters. The demand in certain parishes are much greater than in some,” he said. ‘I am not moving’ Despite the pleas to evacuate, many residents said they were staying put. “I am not moving. I don’t believe I can run from death,” Roy Brown told the AFP news agency in Kingston’s seaside area of Port Royal. The plumber and tiler said he was reluctant to flee because of his past experiences with the poor conditions of government hurricane shelters. In the Flagaman farming community of St Elizabeth, some residents were hunkering down in a store. Owner Enrico Coke said he opened his place for fear that his neighbours had nowhere to go. “I’m concerned about farmers. The fishermen will be suffering after this,” he told AFP. “We’ll need help as soon as possible, especially water for the people.” Colin Bogle, a Mercy Corps adviser based near Kingston, said most families are sheltering in place despite the government ordering evacuations in flood-prone communities. “Many have never experienced anything like this before, and the uncertainty is frightening,” he told The Associated Press news agency. “There is profound fear of losing homes and livelihoods, of injury and of displacement.” Meteorologists said part of Melissa’s punch stems from its slow pace: It is lumbering along slower than most people walk, at just 5km/h (3mph) or less. Advertisement That means areas in its path could endure punishing conditions for far longer than during most hurricanes. People take shelter in a school before Hurricane Melissa’s forecast landfall in Old Harbour, Jamaica, on October 27, 2025 [Matias Delacroix/AP Photo] Climate change After pummelling Jamaica, Melissa is forecast to cross over eastern Cuba on Tuesday night. A hurricane warning was in effect for Granma, Santiago de Cuba, Guantanamo and Holguin provinces while a tropical storm warning was in effect for Las Tunas. Up to 510mm (20 inches) of rain were forecast for parts of Cuba along with a significant storm surge along the coast. Cuban officials said on Monday that they were evacuating more than 600,000 people from the region, including Santiago, the island’s second largest city. A hurricane warning was also in effect for the southeastern and central Bahamas, and a tropical storm warning was issued for the Turks and Caicos Islands. Meteorologist Kerry Emanuel said global warming was causing more storms to rapidly intensify as Melissa did, raising the potential for enormous rains. “Water kills a lot more people than wind,” he told AFP. The last major hurricane to impact Jamaica was Beryl in July 2024 – an abnormally strong storm for that time of year. “Human-caused climate change is making all of the worst aspects of Hurricane Melissa even worse,” climate scientist Daniel Gilford said. Adblock test (Why?)