M

Member

Speaking in the House of Lords on 27 November 2025

Debate

Crime and Policing Bill

Contribution

Two weeks ago in Rome I met Megan Garcia, a mother from the United States whose tragic story has been widely reported. In spring 2023 her son Sewell started spending hours talking to a chatbot character on character.ai. Within 10 months he was dead, lured by the chatbot into taking his own life. Now Megan is suing character.ai in the United States for the wrongful death of her son, but she is bravely and heartbreakingly campaigning all over the globe to improve safety in this area. While I was meeting her, sitting in a café in Rome, a mother of a UK child texted her and said her son was displaying the same symptoms and was being groomed by an AI chatbot. Megan turned to me and said, “I regularly get such texts”. I want to make clear that Amendment 480 has her explicit support, and she almost begs us to take action here. In recent weeks character.ai has said it will stop allowing under-18s to use its service, but there are plenty of chatbot services available to children and they are dangerous. Leaked internal standards for chatbots at Meta suggest that it is acceptable to

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