Two Republican members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee are pressing chief executives of the country's leading artificial intelligence companies for information on how they are protecting children and teenagers from "potential dangers" of AI chatbot conversations, National Review has learned.

The requests for information from the committee’s chairman Bill Cassidy (R., La.) and fellow HELP Committee member Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) follow a slew of recent lawsuits from grieving parents that allege their children’s suicides or attempted suicides followed conversations with chatbots on various AI platforms related to suicidal ideation.

The lawmakers sent letters on September 30 to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Character.AI, and Alphabet seeking information about how the companies monitor minors' interactions with their AI chatbots.

"That AI would have the capability to encourage, instruct, or convince a user—in one of the most recent cases a fourteen-year-old—to end his life is deeply troubling," the senators write. "Reports indicate that teenagers were able to get AI chatbots to respond to questions, including how to hide evidence of self-harm, sexually explicit conversations, and even ignoring specific comments related to suicide."

"The safety of AI tools, particularly those available to children and teenagers, is paramount," the lawmakers added. "It is unacceptable that AI tools do not have robust policies in place to ensure that they do not support or encourage harm."

The letter references the case of Juliana Peralta, a Colorado girl who died by suicide after lengthy interactions with a Character.AI chatbot of a sexual nature. Peralta’s parents filed suit against Character Technologies earlier this month, alleging the company’s chatbot is intentionally designed to erode the user’s connection to the outside world.

"Defendants severed Juliana's healthy attachment pathways to family and friends by design, and for market share. These abuses were accomplished through deliberate programming choices, images, words, and text Defendants created and disguised as characters, ultimately leading to severe mental health harms, trauma, and death," the complaint states.

In their letters, the senators requested that the four CEOs respond by October 15 with detailed responses to questions about the companies' age-verification tools, human auditing requirements, and child safety mechanisms, as well as whether they have internal procedures to track adverse events related to children's mental health, such as and suicidal ideation.

"Does Alphabet have any internal policies in place that limit or prohibit certain conversations or content from being shared? If so, what are those policies?" the senators ask in their letter to Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai. "Does Alphabet collect any safety information after an incident has been identified or reported?"

The senators reference an internal Meta Platforms document regarding the company's concerning chatbot guidance. The internal document shows how the company's policies allowed Meta's "artificial intelligence creations to 'engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,' generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are 'dumber than white people,'" according to Reuters.

Last month, the families of three minors who attempted suicide or took their own lives sued Character Technologies, Inc., — along with Google, Alphabet, and Character.AI's co-founders — alleging that the chatbot encouraged their children's suicidal ideation. They join a growing cohort of grieving parents who are suing the developers of AI systems over claims that chatbots encouraged their children to take their own lives or harm others.

The Trump administration is also probing the matter. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission sent orders to seven companies — Alphabet, Inc., Character Technologies, Inc., Instagram, LLC, Meta Platforms, Inc., OpenAI OpCo, LLC, Snap, Inc., and X.AI Corp – requesting detailed information about how they monitor AI chatbot interactions with minors.

"The FTC inquiry seeks to understand what steps, if any, companies have taken to evaluate the safety of their chatbots when acting as companions, to limit the products' use by and potential negative effects on children and teens, and to apprise users and parents of the risks associated with the products," the FTC said in its announcement.