Newsom signs bills that aim to make social media, AI chatbots safer for young people
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Set us as preferred California, home to the world’s largest tech companies, is placing more guardrails around social media and artificial intelligence as child safety concerns escalate.On Thursday, California Gov.
Gavin Newsom signed more than 10 bills aimed at keeping young people safe online.From suicides to sextortion, parents and their children are wrestling with how social media and AI chatbots could be harming people’s mental and physical health.
The anxiety comes as technology becomes more powerful, playing a bigger role in classrooms, offices and homes.California lawmakers have tried to tackle online safety concerns for years and they’ve faced intense lobbying from tech companies with deep pockets.
State laws in the Golden State has a disproportionate impact on the global tech industry because so many of the top tech titans are based here.“We cannot hand children technology engineered by some of the most sophisticated companies in the world, and then place the burden on kids to defend themselves against it,” said California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom in a press conference on Thursday in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The California governor, who has tried to strike a balance between safety concerns and supporting innovation, has rejected online safety bills in the past that he thought were too restrictive or premature.The batch of new legislation includes Senate Bill 1119, which would require companion chatbot operators to assess risks, notify parents in certain cases if their child threatened to harm themselves, and take other safety steps.
Lawmakers named the bill Adam’s Law, after Adam Raine, a California teen who died by suicide in 2025 after conversing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.The teen’s parents sued OpenAI, alleging in the lawsuit that ChatGPT provided information about suicide methods t...