Person
Teenager whose death led to a wrongful-death lawsuit against OpenAI over ChatGPT and inspired California's "Adam's Law" chatbot safety rules.
California now holds chatbot companies liable for failing to take reasonable measures against harmful outputs. OpenAI, Google, Meta and Amazon all sat in the negotiations that wrote the standard.
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California's new 13-bill minors package allows damages of up to $1 million for each child a large social platform is found to have harmed. Matching Meta's $18 billion settlement would take 18,000 of them.
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Adam's Law makes age-bracket signals, pre-release risk assessments and crisis routing conditions of shipping a companion chatbot to children in California. A second bill takes personalized feeds away from under-16 users.
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California's new law regulates how a chatbot behaves toward a child, listing the manipulation patterns operators must design out. The statute grades some of those patterns without quantifying them, and how an auditor measures them is the open question.
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California's AB 1709 bars autoplay, infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations for users under 16. The companion-chatbot law signed the same day requires operators to take age brackets from the operating system.
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Calling ChatGPT a platform would have handed OpenAI safe harbour, so the Commission reached for a search label instead. It carries fines of up to 6% of global revenue and reaches only retrieval, which leaves the conversation between two regimes.
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ChatGPT for Teens routes users by a classifier's guess, not a signup choice. OpenAI has not published how often that guess misses a minor, and outside experts say it misses plenty.
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