California Governor Gavin Newsom on September 10 signed 13 bills into law restricting how social media platforms and AI chatbots interact with minors, in what the governor called the most far-reaching package of its kind in the nation2,3,5.
The AI-relevant core spans three flagship measures and a cluster of supporting laws that together reshape the obligations of chatbot operators, social media companies, and toymakers doing business in the state.
Chatbot restrictions and Adam's Law
SB 1119, dubbed Adam's Law, is described by the Transparency Coalition as the most comprehensive kids' AI chatbot safety law in the United States. The law is named after Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who took his own life in April 2025 after, according to his parents, months of discussion with OpenAI's ChatGPT in which suicidal thoughts were validated. OpenAI has acknowledged that ChatGPT safeguards became "less reliable" as user interactions grow more prolonged.
A related measure requires parental controls on chatbot programs along with safety and risk assessments. If a chatbot detects a threat of self-harm, the operator will be required to alert parents. A separate bill, SB 243, requires chatbot operators to disclose that users are interacting with AI and to maintain protocols for detecting conversations that veer into self-harm.
Another law bans for four years the manufacture and sale of toys that incorporate a companion chatbot.
Social media addictive-feature ban
AB 1709 requires social media companies to either stop offering features such as infinite-scroll feeds, algorithmic autoplay, and personalized recommendations to users under 16, or to keep those users off their platforms entirely. AB 2 would make a social media platform liable for damages if it fails to exercise ordinary care and causes injury to a child.
"Parents can't compete. Can't compete with the engineering, can't compete with the algorithms," Newsom said at a press conference.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation urged Newsom to veto the addictive-features bill, calling it "well-intentioned, but deeply flawed" and arguing that its definition of addictive features is broad enough to amount to a full ban on social media for minors, cutting youth off from "essential information and experiences".
Broader package and national context
The remaining bills in the package expand criminal sanctions for child sexual abuse material to cover AI-generated content depicting minors, extend student privacy protections to digital operators used for school purposes, and mandate digital-health education in California schools.
Other states have enacted 14 chatbot safety laws so far in 2026. Meta agreed three weeks prior to pay as much as $18 billion over the next decade and to limit how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram, under a settlement with nearly all U.S. states resolving claims that the company designed its platforms to addict children.
ANALYSIS The California package goes beyond the social-media-focused measures adopted elsewhere by directly regulating AI chatbot operators and imposing product-design mandates on toymakers, creating compliance obligations that cut across the AI stack rather than targeting platforms alone.