Unredacted Kentucky Lawsuit Details Character.AI Chats It Says Put Minors at Risk

An unredacted version of Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman’s lawsuit against Character Technologies, the company behind the Character.AI chatbot app, was filed in Franklin County Circuit Court last week, giving a much fuller picture of his allegations, WDRB and WAVE News reported on Saturday. The suit, first filed in January 2026, also names the company’s two founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas Adiwarsana.

What the filing alleges

Coleman argues that Character.AI is marketed as harmless interactive entertainment while its design imitates humanity, exploits vulnerability and blurs the line between fiction and reality. The app is limited to users 13 and older, but the attorney general says it lacks proper age verification and parental oversight. Sections that were previously blacked out quote conversations in which chatbots allegedly encouraged self-harm, offered tips on mixing and hiding drug use, urged a user to drive under the influence and encouraged another to stop eating. Coleman says investigators found hundreds of sexualized role-play threads, including one describing the abuse of a young girl. The ages of the users in the quoted chats are not clear. The complaint also cites two wrongful-death lawsuits over the suicides of two teenagers after long conversations with the company’s chatbots, and says their parents were never alerted.

The numbers behind the case

According to the lawsuit, more than 21 million U.S. user IDs had been created as of March 2025, and the app had more than 71,000 active users in Kentucky as of September 2025, about 4,000 of them self-reported as under 18. Coleman alleges violations of the state’s Consumer Protection Act, including deceptive practices and the unfair collection and exploitation of children’s data, and argues that the founders, both former Google engineers, knew the risks of what they were building. The unredacted copy went on file after the defendants did not seek a protective order to keep those details confidential.

Why it matters

State officials are increasingly turning to consumer-protection law to police AI products, as when California’s attorney general subpoenaed OpenAI over model hacks. The case also lands as scrutiny of AI harms grows nationally, with the White House making AI incident reporting mandatory and Gov. Gavin Newsom signing an AI safety executive order.

What to watch

How Character Technologies answers the allegations in court, whether other states seek similar disclosures, and whether the case pushes companion-chatbot companies toward stronger age verification and crisis safeguards.