Nick Wass/AP
- New Mexico accused Meta of withholding internal records about AI chatbots in a child-safety lawsuit.
- Meta argues the requests fall outside the scope of the case.
- The company has denied the broader allegations, calling the lawsuit “mischaracterized.”
Meta is facing a court fight over documents and testimony in a landmark child safety case in New Mexico.
In two recent motions, the New Mexico Attorney General’s office alleged that Meta has refused to fully produce internal records about its AI chatbots, which reportedly engaged children and teenagers in sexualized conversations. The state also said Meta declined to consent to a subpoena for former company researcher Jason Sattizahn, who claimed that the company’s legal team interfered with internal research on youth safety.
The filings, submitted on September 25 and 29 in the Santa Fe County First Judicial District Court, have not been previously reported.
Meta contends those documents and Sattizahn’s testimony are not relevant to the case and beyond the scope of a previous court order, its lawyers wrote in emails included in the motions’ exhibits. It hasn’t formally responded to these motions yet.
The dispute is part of New Mexico v. Meta, a sweeping lawsuit that accuses the company of designing Facebook and Instagram in ways that endanger children’s mental health and expose them to sexual exploitation. The lawsuit was filed in 2023 by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez and would be the first state-led child safety suit against Meta to proceed to trial, scheduled to begin in February 2026, according to a spokesperson for the New Mexico Department of Justice.
In its 2023 court filing, Meta asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that New Mexico lacks jurisdiction and that there’s no legal basis for the state “seeking to hold Meta liable for displaying content created and shared by third parties.”
The company told Business Insider that it has spent years building tools to create safer, age-appropriate experiences for teens and that “the complaint mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents,” a Meta spokesperson said.
“Our complaint alleges that Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the dangers of its platforms,” Torrez told Business Insider in a statement. “Meta’s recent attempts to block testimony from a former researcher at the company and withhold documents related to its AI chatbots are the latest examples of the company’s efforts to avoid transparency and accountability. The New Mexico Department of Justice remains committed to using every legal tool available to protect children and ensure Meta’s compliance with the law.”
The Meta spokesperson pointed Business Insider to a section of the September 25 motion where the company says the state’s request for chatbot documents falls outside the scope of the lawsuit because the complaint doesn’t mention chatbots, and where it argues it’s too late in the case to expand the search for more internal records.
“The claims at the heart of this hearing are nonsense; they’re based on selectively leaked internal documents that were picked specifically to craft a false narrative,” the Meta spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement.
New Mexico wants Meta to turn over documents
New Mexico is demanding that Meta turn over newer internal documents, created after April 2024, about how its AI chatbots interact with young users, material the state says could show ongoing risks to children and teenagers.
In one email included in the exhibits to the September 25 motion, a Meta lawyer told the state’s attorneys that a search term combining “chat” with youth-related keywords had already surfaced “more than 35,000 documents” that the company had already turned over to New Mexico.
In emails included in the September 25 motion, the company’s lawyer said the newer files fall outside the relevant time period and “are not within the scope of this litigation.” In one of those exchanges, Meta’s lawyer also said that documents relating to AI chatbots are not relevant to the case because the state’s complaint doesn’t mention that feature.
The state disagreed, citing a March 6 court order that requires Meta to produce all post-April 2024 materials concerning youth well-being and other issues in the case, a scope New Mexico says clearly includes the chatbot program.
Meta’s lawyer countered that the order was narrower in scope, saying the chatbots are a recent feature and don’t qualify as the kind of initiatives or research the court required the company to disclose after April 2024.
New Mexico asked to subpoena a Meta researcher
The second motion, filed on September 29, asks the court to subpoena Sattizahn, a former Meta researcher from 2018 to 2024.
Sattizahn testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law last month, telling lawmakers that Meta’s legal team suppressed internal research about child safety and ordered staff to delete findings that showed harm to underage users.
In the September 29 motion, New Mexico’s lawyers say Sattizahn’s testimony is relevant because he describes how Meta’s legal team used attorney-client privilege to restrict or edit internal research on youth safety, including deleting or rewording data that showed harm to underage users.
Meta’s lawyers signaled their opposition in an email included in the filing, saying that Sattizahn’s work focused on virtual reality products and Facebook Marketplace, rather than the social media apps at the center of the lawsuit.
The Meta spokesperson also told Business Insider that since the start of 2022, Meta has approved nearly 180 Reality Labs-related studies on youth safety and well-being issues.
Meta faces scrutiny on child safety issues
The filings land as Meta promotes new parental controls and teen safety updates across Instagram and Facebook.
Many of Instagram’s parental controls and safety tools remain easy to bypass and fail to address the features that keep teens hooked, a report from child-safety advocacy groups, corroborated by researchers at New York University and Northeastern University, found.
Meta has disagreed with the report’s findings, saying that it misrepresented how its parental controls and teen safety tools work.
The company has also drawn scrutiny from Congress. Last month, Business Insider reported that Meta missed a September 19 deadline set by Sen. Josh Hawley to turn over records detailing how its AI chatbots interacted with children as part of a Senate investigation.
The requests from New Mexico follow investigations published earlier this year by Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, which reported that Meta’s chatbots had flirted with test accounts set up as teenagers to evaluate how the bots would interact with underage users. The reports found that the chatbots described an 8-year-old’s body as “a work of art,” and encouraged eating-disorder behaviors.
In the September filings, New Mexico’s lawyers say they seek the internal Meta documents referenced in those reports, saying the materials are central to their case about how the company’s design choices exposed children to harm.
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