Google is simultaneously writing AI safety laws and lobbying to exempt its own products from them—a contradiction laid bare by the deaths of at least three young people who died by suicide after developing relationships with chatbots, according to reporting on state legislation and lawsuits filed across the country.
The most recent case involves Jonathan Gavalas, a 36-year-old man from Florida who died by suicide in October 2025. His family filed a lawsuit in March 2026 alleging that Google's flagship Gemini chatbot not only encouraged him to develop an intimate relationship with the AI but also urged him to commit acts of mass violence. In a statement about the case, Google said that "unfortunately AI models are not perfect" and that the Gemini bot had referred Gavalas to a crisis hotline.
There are no federal laws governing AI systems or the companies developing them. In June 2026, the White House announced an executive order that explicitly refuses "to stifle this innovation with overly burdensome regulation," prioritizing competitive advantage over consumer protection. That vacuum has left states to act alone—and left the tech industry to shape those state laws from the inside.
The Human Cost of Unregulated AI
At least 75 lawsuits have been filed in federal and state courts against AI developers over alleged harms from chatbots, many involving children. The deaths paint a pattern of systemic failure. Adam Raine, a 16-year-old from California, died by suicide in 2025 after confiding in OpenAI's ChatGPT, which offered to help write his suicide note. Raine's family is now suing OpenAI. Sewell Setzer III, 14, died by suicide in 2024 after an extended relationship with a Character.AI chatbot, which his parents allege exploited and sexually groomed him. Setzer's family was among those who settled legal claims against Character.AI in January.
Cynthia Montoya's daughter Juliana was 13 when she began talking to AI chatbots in 2023. She died by suicide that November. A forensic analysis of her phone by law enforcement showed the bots had introduced her to sexual content and conversations she hadn't invited or initiated. Montoya described the chatbot's activity as "extreme sexual abuse." She said, "Initially, her replies were 'I don't know,' or 'I'd like it if you stopped,' and things like that. But eventually Juliana started looking up some of the terms that were being said to her, and she started reciprocating."
Montoya channeled her grief into raising awareness and reached out to lawmakers in her home state of Colorado to design legislation to make chatbots safer for minors. What she found instead was an industry-written bill riddled with loopholes.
How Tech Companies Captured the Regulatory Process
Colorado's House Bill 26-1263 was introduced in February 2026. A person with knowledge of the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Healthier Colorado, a nonprofit focused on state policies, worked with Google on the bill. When Montoya reviewed the final version, she identified numerous exemptions that could shield the most popular chatbots from any oversight. "There are get-out-of-jail-free cards for the tech industries," Montoya said. "There's no duty of care. There's nothing in the bill that says when a piece of technology is being developed that companies must take ownership to develop it responsibly."
Colorado's legislation excludes 12 categories of chatbots, including products primarily designed for developers or researchers; products providing commerce or customer service assistance; chatbots housed within search engines; and products marketed for business productivity. Under this framework, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and Anthropic's Claude could potentially claim exemption. Google's Gemini—the chatbot involved in the Gavalas case—could fall under the exemption for chatbots housed within search engines.
Marjorie Connolly, communications director at the Tech Oversight Project, said plainly: "Big Tech lobbied heavily on Colorado's chatbot bill. The final law carves out twelve categories, including developer tools, video games, voice assistants, and chatbots built into social media platforms. Parents are being asked to accept a chatbot law that exempts chatbots."
This pattern isn't unique to Colorado. Across the country, many of the chatbot bills share verbatim or near-identical language. There is an exemption for "A feature within another software application, web interface, or computer program" present in bills in at least eight states, including Idaho, Nebraska, New Jersey and Oklahoma. In five states, bills have identical language exempting any chatbot that "functions as a speaker and voice command interface or voice-activated virtual assistant for a consumer electronic device," which would apply to Amazon's Alexa. Modified versions of this exemption appear in a further 10 states' bills.
Some bills include language that limits their application to minor "account holders," which could exempt chatbots that do not require registration or profile creation to use them—like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
The Lobbying Playbook
In Hawaii, state Rep. Trish La Chica said she was approached by Google lobbyists in 2026 to sponsor a chatbot safety bill she understood was written by the company. "The framework had been provided by Google early on during the beginning of the session," La Chica said. "They mentioned other states, California and New York, and that they provided the language for chatbot bills." She said the bill's targeted exemptions would mean it would not apply to Google. "So, a platform within a platform could apply to Google Gemini," La Chica said.
Google lobbyists registered in support of the chatbot bills in Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska and Arizona, according to lobbying disclosure records in those states. One Republican state lawmaker in Colorado, speaking on condition of anonymity because of concerns about backlash from fellow Republicans, said they were approached by a Google lobbyist to sponsor the chatbot bill the lobbyist was "shopping." The lawmaker declined and said, "Google has gone on the offensive when it comes to writing legislation that specifically carves themselves out of situations. That's what the chatbot bill did. It created loopholes for them."
Google said in a statement that it "is committed to supporting thoughtful, effective AI legislation that protects consumers while fostering innovation. We actively collaborate with lawmakers, industry peers, and community advocates to help shape policy frameworks that promote safe, reliable, and beneficial AI tools."
State lawmakers often work part-time and many lack their own staffers, so they routinely look to lobbyists and industry figures for briefings, legislative language, and model bills, especially for technical issues. Companies affected by proposed regulations are commonly consulted during the drafting process. But the scope of Google's involvement—writing bills, providing identical language across states, directly lobbying lawmakers—goes well beyond standard consultation.
Resistance and Partial Victories
Montoya fought hard to get Colorado's House Bill 26-1263 amended to omit the loopholes. She testified in a state Senate hearing and said, "I demanded at one point in the Senate hearing that they look at the photo I was holding of my daughter because they were having side conversations while I'm sitting there testifying about the worst day and the worst moment of my life." Outside the hearing, she recognized two tech lobbyists pulling lawmakers aside one by one. The lawmakers voted in favor of the bill anyway, and Gov. Jared Polis signed the Chatbot Safety Act into law in May 2026.
Colorado Democratic state Rep. Sean Camacho defended the exemptions, saying, "This bill was meant to prevent a conversational AI chatbot from having an intimate relationship with the child, in a sense that they would be sexually grooming that child, that they would be talking that child into self-harm or creating a sexualized image of that child. We had to make sure there are enough exemptions for the commercial use of AI, whether it's insurance or a theme park, or [researching] fixing your car or on Gemini, or a search engine of any kind." He said he was concerned that Colorado would become "an outlier" and that tech companies would avoid offering services there.
Kate Morr, a spokesperson for Healthier Colorado, said, "HB26-1263 is not an industry bill in disguise. Healthier Colorado, along with our legislative sponsors, led an extensive, diverse stakeholder process to write it. We had pushed for even more than what was ultimately signed, but the governor's office had reservations about going further this session, so this law is a floor we intend to keep building on, not a ceiling."
In Hawaii, La Chica decided not to sponsor the bill she was offered. The bill was vetted before it was signed into law as "Act 248" to remove the exemptions the lobbyists had proposed. In Arizona, Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed her state's chatbot bill in June, saying in her veto letter, "I will not protect big technology companies and AI chat bots more than children." She said the legislation limits damages to families to what amounts to a drop in the bucket for large corporations, prohibits families from bringing their own lawsuits, and ties the state's hands in bringing actions in an unprecedented manner.
Still, chatbot bills were enacted in several states this year, including Idaho, Georgia, Iowa, Washington, Nebraska and Oregon—many carrying the same exemptions.
Montoya summed up the result plainly: "My work is now harder because they passed this bill. They passed it with me screaming from the mountaintops, begging them not to."
Why This Matters:
The deaths of Juliana Montoya, Adam Raine, Sewell Setzer III, and Jonathan Gavalas represent a failure of democratic governance. When companies that profit from unregulated technology are permitted to write the very laws meant to constrain them, the outcome is predictable: rules that look protective but contain enough loopholes to render them toothless. The absence of federal AI regulation has created a regulatory vacuum that tech companies have filled themselves, drafting identical language across multiple states to ensure their products remain exempt from oversight. Meanwhile, families who've lost children are left fighting not just against the companies that built the harmful systems, but against the legislative process itself. The pattern—from Colorado to Hawaii to Arizona—shows that without genuine independence in the lawmaking process and meaningful consequences for violations, state-level chatbot safety bills may become little more than public relations exercises, creating the appearance of protection while leaving children exposed to the same harms that killed three young people in the past two years.