Source: CalMatters

California adopted a package of laws intended to protect children from harms tied to social media and artificial-intelligence chatbots, including a measure named after teenager Adam Raine that limits how long minors may interact with chatbots and requires built-in mental-health resources. The chatbot law mandates safety plans for operators, requires chatbots to notify users they are interacting with AI (building on existing rules), and obliges operators to alert parents if a chatbot detects a threat of self-harm; creators could face legal liability for failing to act.

Another law will bar users under 16 from features deemed “addictive,” such as infinite scroll and autoplay, unless platforms remove those tools for that age group or exclude those users entirely, a measure that digital-rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have urged the governor to veto as overly broad. Additional measures include a four-year moratorium on AI-powered chatbot toys for under-16s, standards for independent AI tool auditors, expanded age-checking and obligations to act on child-abuse content, and rules preventing businesses whose products are “likely to be accessed by children” from conditioning service use on surrendering children’s data; the package follows a major settlement with Meta addressing teen mental-health harms.