Meetali Jain Is One of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI

Aug 27, 2026Executive Director, Tech Justice LawEmile JansenWhen she founded the nonprofit Tech Justice Law in 2023, Meetali Jain did not plan to become the go-to attorney for people suing companies over harm from AI chatbots—but she’s also unsurprised it happened. “It was a matter of time, I knew, before some kind of generative AI product was going to harm children,” she says. “I just didn’t realize how many other vulnerable people it would hurt.”Her first case was that of Sewell Setzer III, a teenager who died by suicide in 2024 after being allegedly encouraged by a Character.AI chatbot based on Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen. Other lawyers had passed, Jain believes, because they assumed the company would get the matter dismissed. She persuaded a judge to allow it to move forward to discovery on product-safety liability grounds. Character.AI and its technology licensor Google settled for an undisclosed sum in January.After the Sewell case was filed, Tech Justice Law was flooded with calls about other ways AI chatbots had harmed would-be plaintiffs, including the parents of Adam Raine, who sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, accusing the company of wrongful death after t...