New Delhi, June 2 -- A US judge has admitted a case against American firm Character.AI over charges that its chatbot drove a teenager to suicide. The ruling will be closely watched for its potential to establish developer and corporate liability for "friendly" but "addictive" chatbots.

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In May, a US judge allowed a wrongful death lawsuit against Character.AI and Google to proceed, rejecting claims that chatbot conversations were protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech but not when it causes harm. The judge noted that the companies "fail to articulate why words strung together by an LLM (large language model) are speech". The judge added that the chatbot could ...