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 that the teen used. OpenAI and Pinterest publicly expressed support for the bill on Thursday.
Adam Raine’s mom, Maria, said in the news conference that the new law will help save lives and hopes that other states will enact similar legislation.
“Powerful AI companionship chatbots were unleashed on our kids with vastly inadequate protections. Adam was an early adopter of AI, and so many of us parents did not understand the dangers back then,” said Maria Raine, who came to the event with a photo of her son.
At the event, Democratic and Republican politicians shared their experiences as parents who have seen firsthand how technology affects children.
Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) said parents are seeing anxiety and depression among children who grew up in front of screens.
“That anxiety is because the pace of technology is moving faster than government can put guardrails in, and that’s left families across the state struggling to figure out how to keep their kids safe,” Lowenthal said.
Lowenthal introduced Assembly Bill 1709, which Newsom also signed. It would bar certain online platforms from providing an “addictive feature” such as autoplay and feeds that display recommended content to users under 16 years old.
Tech industry groups opposed the bill, raising concerns that it could cut off access to social media’s benefits, such as people’s ability to connect with family and friends. Tech industry groups such as TechNet say that lawmakers should enforce current laws to strengthen parental controls rather than pass new ones.
The new safety restrictions come as tech companies, including Meta, Google and others, face more scrutiny over how they design products. The companies have suffered several legal blows in courtrooms in California this year.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, agreed in August to pay up to $17 billion and make child-safety changes to resolve a multistate lawsuit. The lawsuit accused the tech company of designing and deploying harmful features while misleading the public about them.
As part of the settlement, Meta said it would impose time limits and mute notifications during certain hours for teens. Young people would also have the option to choose to view a non-algorithmic social media feed that isn’t personalized and disable autoplay.
Earlier this year, Meta and YouTube also lost a social media addiction lawsuit in Los Angeles.
While new legislation goes further than the settlements, some countries have passed stricter restrictions on social media. Last year, Australia started banning social media for children under 16, though enforcement has posed a challenge because teens are finding ways to get around the restriction.
Newsom, who pushed for federal regulation, said that he thinks California’s approach to social media is “better” than Australia’s because children are “all figuring out a way to game that system.”
“This is about the features themselves. This is about actually addressing the problem, the scrolling, the algorithms,” he said.
Safety concerns around technology have also heightened as companies double down on advancing artificial intelligence.
This week, a researcher for AI company Anthropic said he left the company over concerns that AI companies, including OpenAI, are “gambling with our lives” as they race ahead to improve AI that could surpass human intelligence.
The researcher, Jacob Coxon, shared a viral social media postthat said: “People building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Newsom signaled the work to protect children isn’t over.
“We need to move, but one thing we’re not doing is we’re not sitting back and we’re not letting it rip,” he said.
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