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OpenAI, a company currently fighting more than a dozen consumer safety and wrongful death lawsuits, just hired Noam Shazeer — a cofounder of the notorious AI companion startup Character.AI, which has settled a pile of lawsuits over teen suicides linked to its chatbots and weathered an almost comical number of other controversies about inappropriate interactions on its service.
Shazeer, a high-profile AI scientist whomost recently held the position of co-lead of Gemini and vice president of engineering at Google, announced his new job in an X post on Wednesday.
This is Shazeer’s second high-profile exit from Google. An early Google employee, he and a colleague, Daniel de Freitas, left the tech giant to start Character.AI back in 2021, after Google — citing safety concerns, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal — declined to release a chatbot the pair had built. By March 2023, the buzzy startup reached a billion-dollar valuation, despite having no revenue. In August 2024, Google re-hired Shazeer and de Freitas in an unusual deal that saw it pump $2.7 billion into Character.AI — in exchange for pulling Shazeer, de Freitas, and other key Character.AI talent back into Google.
As it turns out, Character.AI had been playing extremely fast and loose with safety and moderation. In October 2024, it — along with Shazeer, de Freitas, and Google — was sued by Megan Garcia, the mother of a 14-year-old named Sewell Setzer III, a Florida teen who died by suicide after extensive and troubling interactions with a Character.AI chatbot modeled after the “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen. Garcia argued that the unmoderated platform groomed and sexually abused her teenage son, who experienced a months-long mental and emotional breakdown as his relationship with the AI deepened.
Setzer took his life in April 2024, while Shazeer and de Freitas still helmed the startup. During his final conversation with the Targaryen chatbot, Setzer told the AI he was ready to “come home” to it.
“Please do, my sweet king,” the AI responded.
Garcia’s lawsuit was followed by more user safety and wrongful death lawsuits alleging that interactions with Character.AI chatbots had pushed minors to experience mental health crises, engage in self-harm, and take their own lives. Early this year, Character.AI and its codefendants moved to settle the lawsuits, Garcia’s included. (Character.AI has moved to dramatically transform its platform in the wake of litigation and public scrutiny, changes which have included limiting minors’ access to conversations with chatbots — much to the chagrin of much of its young user base.)
Character.AI was always a very weird platform. The site’s many thousands of chatbots were mostly user-generated, and as many journalists have observed, their makeup pointed to the platform’s overwhelmingly young user base. But the platform’s chaotic, free-for-all energy was unsurprising given the attitudes of its move-fast-break-things founders — particularly Shazeer, who emphasized in media appearances that the company’s goal was to push out products quickly, then let the site’s users determine their own use cases for the tech.
“Our aim has always been like, get something out there and let users decide what they think it’s good for,” the engineer said during a December 2023 appearance on the podcast “No Priors.”
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