While Europe works toward a unified approach to age assurance regulation, American legal structures and values have fractured the national debate, with various states emerging to champion different laws and approaches. A slate of new laws passed in California see the Golden State aiming to lead the way on legislating AI companies, and on establishing device-based age checks as the standard. The various bills cover age verification, reporting mechanisms for child sexual abuse material, companion chatbots, addictive feeds and “digital wellness.”
A release from the office of governor Gavin Newsom boasts of “creating the strongest companion chatbot regulations in the nation.” The legislation, SB 1119 – dubbed Adam’s Law after Adam Raine, whose parents allege in a lawsuit that ChatGPT coached him in planning and taking his own life – is the first in the U.S. to require companies to conduct independent child safety audits and annual risk assessments.
OpenAI believes teens can benefit from AI without sacrificing safety
California’s law has received a positive response from both OpenAI (which makes ChatGPT) and child media safety watchdog Common Sense Media.
A statement from OpenAI says the company supports SB 1119, which “establishes meaningful safeguards for how young people use AI while preserving their access to tools that can help them learn, create, and prepare for the future.”
It also touts its new ChatGPT for Teens product, which it says is “designed to help users under 18 learn, think critically, and build while promoting healthy use, providing built-in safeguards, and giving parents additional controls.”
“If our system estimates someone is under 18 or they state their age is between 13 and 17, they are automatically placed into ChatGPT for Teens. Those protections are part of the baseline experience, not optional settings that users can turn off.”
Meanwhile, a statement from Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, applauds AB 1709, which amends the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act with a ban on serving addictive features to users under 16, and requires platforms to verify a user’s age under AB 1043, the Digital Age Assurance Act, before unlocking those features.
The law comes with civil penalties of up to $50,000 per affected minor for knowing violations and $25,000 for negligent violations.
“California just drew the line the industry spent a decade pretending didn’t exist,” Steyer says. “Platforms will no longer be able to target kids under 16 with features that have been engineered to siphon their attention. That is a major victory for kids, and California won it first. Every legislator in every statehouse should be putting this bill into motion.”
There has also been movement through the courts. Meta’s $1.8 billion settlement in California’s social media harms case included commitments, subject to conditions, to implement enhanced age assurance measures.
Chatbots may not get the same regulatory leash social media did
Steyer may be onto something. As AI’s presence in our lives grows, so too will calls for safe deployment. The recent statements from Silicon Valley leaders urging a slowdown on risky AI development are a portent of laws to come.
The situation is socially novel: we have a product that has been positioned as a transformational advance for humans, while simultaneously being framed as its largest threat. There have been few technologies regulated as quickly on the heels of their release as large language model chatbots and generative AI. Given the stakes, the closest analogue is probably nuclear capability.
So, it is highly likely that more states will follow California in drawing up legislation on chatbots. California may indeed serve as a model. What remains to be seen is how, in their strategies, AI companies align with or divert from the social media playbook, which has largely involved platforms publicly agreeing to laws they are happy to ignore.
AB 1856 narrows open-source exposure
AB 1856, part of the latest package, clarifies and extends AB 1043, California’s Digital Age Assurance Act. It formalizes non-personally identifiable age-bracket signals for users under 13, aged 13 to 15, aged 16 to 17, and 18 or older from operating systems and app stores to developers.
The change addresses concerns that the earlier law could sweep Linux and other open-source operating systems into requirements designed primarily for commercial platform providers.
Article Topics
age verification | California | chatbots | device-based age verification | legislation | OpenAI | social media
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