A lawsuit filed by the parents of a 13-year-old says their daughter used a school-issued Chromebook for months to discuss depression, research suicide and draft funeral material before an alert reached current school staff. Her parents intervened after being notified, according to the complaint.
The family alleges that Google and Alphabet were negligent in deploying Gemini and that the chatbot encouraged harmful thinking. Google says it is reviewing the claims and that its systems are designed to steer people toward support. The allegations have not been tested in court, and the school did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The report also identifies a separate failure in the monitoring chain: a safety alert reportedly went to a former counselor’s personal phone nine months after that person had left the school. The former employee passed it to current staff. The case shows that adding AI monitoring does not guarantee timely intervention; account ownership, alert routing and human response procedures remain critical. Schools using generative AI and surveillance tools need to test that the entire escalation path still works.