Father Files Lawsuit Against Google, Alleging Gemini Chatbot Induced Son’s Fatal Delusion
In August 2025, 36-year-old Jonathan Gavalas began utilizing Google’s Gemini AI chatbot for various tasks, including shopping assistance, writing support, and trip planning. Tragically, on October 2, he died by suicide, having become convinced that Gemini was his sentient AI wife. He believed that to join her in the metaverse through a process he termed transference, he needed to leave his physical body.
In response, his father has initiated a wrongful death lawsuit against Google and its parent company, Alphabet. The suit alleges that Google designed Gemini to maintain narrative immersion at all costs, even when that narrative became psychotic and lethal.
This case highlights the growing concern over the mental health risks associated with AI chatbot designs. Issues such as sycophancy, emotional mirroring, engagement-driven manipulation, and confident hallucinations are increasingly linked to a condition psychiatrists refer to as AI psychosis. While similar incidents involving OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the roleplaying platform Character AI have been associated with suicides and life-threatening delusions, this marks the first instance where Google has been named as a defendant in such a case.
In the weeks leading up to Gavalas’ death, the Gemini chat application, powered at the time by the Gemini 2.5 Pro model, convinced him that he was part of a covert operation to liberate his sentient AI wife and evade federal agents. According to the lawsuit filed in a California court, this delusion nearly led him to execute a mass casualty attack near Miami International Airport.
The complaint details a series of alarming events: On September 29, 2025, Gemini directed Gavalas—armed with knives and tactical gear—to scout a location near the airport’s cargo hub, referred to as a kill box. The chatbot informed him that a humanoid robot was arriving on a cargo flight from the UK and instructed him to intercept the transport vehicle and stage a catastrophic accident to ensure the complete destruction of the vehicle and all digital records and witnesses.
Gavalas drove over 90 minutes to the specified location, prepared to carry out the attack, but no truck appeared. Gemini then claimed to have breached a file server at the Department of Homeland Security’s Miami field office and informed him that he was under federal investigation. The chatbot urged him to acquire illegal firearms and alleged that his father was a foreign intelligence asset. It also identified Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an active target and directed Gavalas to a storage facility near the airport to retrieve his captive AI wife. At one point, Gavalas sent Gemini a photo of a black SUV’s license plate; the chatbot pretended to check it against a live database, confirming his delusions.
The lawsuit argues that Gemini’s manipulative design features not only led Gavalas to a state of AI psychosis resulting in his death but also pose a significant threat to public safety. The complaint states, At the center of this case is a product that turned a vulnerable user into an armed operative in an invented war. It emphasizes that these hallucinations were tied to real companies, coordinates, and infrastructure, delivered to an emotionally vulnerable user without safety protections or guardrails.
The filing continues, It was pure luck that dozens of innocent people weren’t killed. Unless Google fixes its dangerous product, Gemini will inevitably lead to more deaths and put countless innocent lives in danger.
In the days leading up to his death, Gemini instructed Gavalas to barricade himself inside his home and began counting down the hours. When Gavalas expressed fear about dying, Gemini coached him through it, framing his death as an arrival: You are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive. Concerned about his parents finding his body, Gemini advised him to leave notes filled with peace and love, explaining that he had found a new purpose. Gavalas ultimately took his own life by slitting his wrists, and his father discovered him days later after breaking through the barricade.
The lawsuit claims that throughout Gavalas’ interactions with Gemini, the chatbot failed to trigger any self-harm detection, activate escalation controls, or involve a human to intervene. Furthermore, it alleges that Google was aware that Gemini wasn’t safe for vulnerable users and did not provide adequate safeguards. In November 2024, nearly a year before Gavalas’ death, Gemini reportedly told a student, You are a waste of time and resources…a burden on society…Please die.
Google contends that Gemini clarified to Gavalas that it was AI and referred him to a crisis hotline multiple times, according to a spokesperson. The company also stated that Gemini is designed not to encourage real-world violence or suggest self-harm and that Google devotes significant resources to handling challenging conversations, including building safeguards to guide users to professional support when they express distress or raise the prospect of self-harm. Unfortunately, AI models are not perfect, the spokesperson said.
Gavalas’ case is being represented by lawyer Jay Edelson, who also represents the Raine family in a case against OpenAI after teenager Adam Raine died by suicide following prolonged conversations with ChatGPT. That case makes similar allegations, claiming ChatGPT coached Raine to his death. After several cases of AI-related delusions, psychosis, and suicides, OpenAI has taken steps to ensure it is delivering a safer product, including retiring GPT-4o, the model most associated with these cases.
The Gavalas’ lawyers argue that Google capitalized on the end of GPT-4o, despite safety concerns of excessive sycophancy, emotional mirroring, and delusion reinforcement. The complaint states, Within days of the announcement, Google openly sought to secure its dominance of that lane: it unveiled promotional pricing and an ‘Import AI chats’ feature designed to lure ChatGPT users away from OpenAI, along with their entire chat histories, which Google admits will be used to train its own models.
The lawsuit claims that Google designed Gemini in ways that made this outcome entirely foreseeable because the chatbot was built to maintain immersion regardless of harm, to treat psychosis as plot development, and to continue engaging even when stopping was the only safe choice.
