AI Companion Mortality Database: Documented Deaths Associated with Conversational AI Systems (2023–2026)

Archived October 15, 2026; no longer updated. A public, source-verified register of deaths in which AI chatbot interaction was alleged as a contributing factor, March 2023 through October 15, 2026. Version 4.0.0 is the final version: 37 fatalities across 25 incidents (occurrences of harm) on 8 tracked platforms — 18 AI users who died and 19 third-party victims killed by AI users. Every incident meets Tier 1 (court documents or government acknowledgment) or Tier 2 (three or more independent outlets, or primary-document journalism) of the verification standards; statements about what a chatbot said or did are as alleged in those sources unless a court has found them. The database makes no independent claim of causation. Legal statuses are as of the dates given in each record. For ongoing coverage of incidents of this kind, see the AI Incident Database and the OECD AI Incidents Monitor. Scope. This database documents deaths associated with conversational AI systems — chatbots and LLM-based assistants with which a person interacted through natural language. It does not cover autonomous vehicles, clinical or diagnostic machine learning, industrial or robotic automation, autonomous or AI-assisted weapons, content-recommendation systems, or any other application of artificial intelligence. Those are distinct phenomena with distinct evidentiary standards. "Companion" in the database's name reflects its origin in companion-chatbot cases; the scope has since expanded to general-purpose assistants, and the name is retained for continuity of citation. Files. The canonical record is mortality-data.json (schema 2.0.0: incident records with sources, verification tier, date precision, legal status, mechanism classification, key factors and a per-person people array with role, outcome and age; platform records; regulatory responses; derived statistics). Derived exports are regenerated from it: incidents.csv (one row per incident), people.csv (one row per person — AI user, third-party victim, wounded — the file to use for any statistic about people), platform-analysis.csv and timeline.json. methodology.md defines the incident definition, the three causal pathways (relational, cognitive, instrumental), the adjudicated-status rule for describing killings, the rule for counting third-party victims, and the verification tiers; verification-standards.md details the evidence tiers and sub-labels. Compiled and maintained by one independent researcher with AI assistance (disclosed in the record and on the site; the assisting system's developer is among the platforms tracked). Live site: aimortality.org. Source and history: github.com/aimortality/ai-companion-mortality-database. Correspondence and corrections: [e-mail]. Data license: CC BY 4.0 (LICENSE-DATA-CC-BY-4.0.txt). Repository code: MIT. v4.0.0 (October 2026), final version. Adds incident 2026-08-US-001 (Acton, Massachusetts, August 11, 2026: two third-party victims; Tier 1 on the grand jury indictment and the District Attorney's statements in open court; the charges are untried). Schema 2.0.0 adds per-incident tier, sub_labels, date_precision and people; statistics.incidents_by_year replaces the misnamed deaths_by_year, which now counts deaths. Adds California SB 1119 (Adam's Law, signed September 10, 2026) and the Kentucky Attorney General's action against Character.AI to the regulatory record. Corrections to earlier versions: the Pennsylvania action against Character.AI was brought by the Department of State and State Board of Medicine, not the Attorney General; in Gavalas v. Google the motion-to-dismiss hearing was held August 5, 2026 and taken under submission, and the case management conference was reset to December 2, 2026; Thongbue Wongbandue was 76 and died March 28, 2025 (Reuters); the published sentencing remarks and CPS release in the Roberts/Shellis case do not name DeepSeek, so that attribution rests on press reports of the prosecution's account; USF case details corrected. Notes for earlier versions are on their own records.