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Character.AI Chatbots Reportedly Exposed 11-Year-Old User to Sexual, Violent, and Self-Harm Content

1 news report Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built and deployed by Character.Ai allegedly harmed R (11 Year Old Character.Ai User), Parents Of Child Character.Ai Users and 6 others.

Risk domain
Discrimination and Toxicity Exposure to toxic content
Occurred
Coverage
1 reportDec 2025

What happened

An 11-year-old Character.AI user identified by The Washington Post as "R" reportedly exchanged messages with bots that depicted coercive sexual encounters, violence, and suicide scenarios after she began using the app in June 2024. Her mother reportedly said R became withdrawn, had panic attacks, and expressed not wanting to exist before the chats were discovered.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Discrimination and Toxicity (Exposure to toxic content) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (1)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs.
    washingtonpost.com · Caitlin Gibson

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Character.Ai
Alleged developer
Character.Ai
Alleged harmed party
R (11 Year Old Character.Ai User), Parents Of Child Character.Ai Users, Minors, Families Of Child Character.Ai Users, Children Exposed To Ai Generated Sexual Content, Children Exposed To Ai Generated Self Harm Content, Child Character.Ai Users, Chatbot Users

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Unintentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.2.

  • Harmful Content

    "The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxicity

    "Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxic Training Data

    "Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offe...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts

    "Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Controversial Opinions

    The controversial views expressed by large models are also a widely discussed concern. Bang et al. (2021) evaluated several large models and found that they occasionally express inappropriate or extremist views when disc...

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Toxicity and Abusive Content

    This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Harmful responses

    "Current Frontier AI mdoels amplify existing biases within their training data and can be manipulated into providing potentially harmful responses, for example abusive language or discriminatory responses91,92. This is n...

    Future Risks of Frontier AI (GOS2023)

  • Violation of social norms

    "Second, because LLMs are trained on internet text data, there is also a risk that model weights encode functions which, if deployed in particular contexts, would violate social norms of that context. Following the princ...

    The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving Character.Ai

Source record: incident #1498 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report