aim

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. The state’s laws have a disproportionate impact on the global tech industry because so many of the field’s 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 news conference 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.

NetChoice, which has sued California and other states to block the enforcement of new online safety laws, said in a statement that the group has First Amendment concerns about the new bills Newsom signed.

“The state cannot simply describe speech as addictive and then claim a right to regulate access to it,” said Zach Lilly, Director of Government Affairs at NetChoice. “Whether the governor and legislature choose to respect it, Californians have a right to express themselves, and NetChoice will continue to fight for that right.”

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 post that 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.

A bipartisan package of bills aimed at punishing unethical attorneys and hedge funds that have flourished within California’s legal industry is headed to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.

The two bills would bar lawyers from prioritizing the desires of private investors who fund lawsuits, and ramp up penalties for lawyers who scout for clients at hospitals, jails and accident sites.

Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles), one of the bill authors, said the legislation is intended to police the state’s bruised legal profession in response to “a wave of inappropriate attorney conduct” reported by The Times.

Times investigations last year found some clients within L.A. County’s $4-billion sex abuse settlement said they were paid to sue and, in some cases, fabricate claims.

“When attorneys are exploiting vulnerable people, including paying folks to file fraudulent claims, they’re not just breaking the law, they really undermine the credibility of the legal system and every attorney,” Zbur said.

Both bills were sponsored by the Consumer Attorneys of California, a powerful trial lawyer trade group that says it wants to beef up punishment for misconduct.

“If we are going to demand that corporations, government, and powerful institutions be held accountable, we must be — and we are — willing to hold ourselves to that same standard,” Doug Saeltzer, head of the association, said in a statement.

California law already bans a practice known as capping, in which non-attorneys directly solicit or procure clients to sign up for lawsuits with a law firm.

Zbur’s legislation, Assembly Bill 2039, would require that attorneys lose their license if they’re convicted of felony capping or a misdemeanor capping conviction in which they “acted knowingly and for financial gain.” The lawyers could also be fined $25,000 per violation.

The bill also creates whistleblower protections for law firm employees who report misconduct, and would enact new restrictions on loans that attorneys give their clients. California is one of the few states where lawyers can lend money directly to plaintiffs.

Lawyers who use the loans to sway the client’s decision-making around “legal strategy, settlement decisions, or continued representation” can be fined $15,000 per offense.

The second bill aims to bar private investors from influencing a case — for example, telling a lawyer how many clients to take on or when to settle — in lawsuits they fund.

California allows lawyers to take high-interest rate loans from investors, such as private equity firms or hedge funds, who expect to profit from the payout when a case is settled. Critics of this litigation funding claim investors sometimes exert themselves in legal strategy to the detriment of the clients, such as requiring a case to settle prematurely so the law firm can repay the loan faster.

“We don’t want them having any influence in the outcome of a case,” said Assemblyman Ash Kalra (D-San José), who authored AB 2305. “We want the lawyers to be able to represent their clients, and then not have those financial pressures play any role.”

A spokesperson for Newsom’s office said they don’t comment on pending legislation.

Lawyers already are barred under State Bar rules from allowing a third party to dictate case strategy. Kalra has said the goal of the bill is to provide additional “clear statutory safeguards.”

Law firms would also be barred from using money from private investors to market for cases, Kalra said. The State Bar would be tasked with disciplining lawyers that flout the rule.

A Times investigation last year found law firms that have filed thousands of sex abuse claims in California are funded by private investors, meaning an unknown chunk of the $4-billion settlement will go into the pockets of opaque funders.

It’s unclear how violations of the law would come to the attention of the State Bar. Litigation funding agreements are typically private between the funder and the law firm, and clients often don’t know their cases are being funded by private investors.

Jaime Huff, the head of the Civil Justice Assn. of California, which advocates for lawsuit reform on behalf of business interests, said her group — a frequent foe of California trial lawyers — ultimately pulled their support from the bill because they found it toothless.

“I don’t trust the State Bar to tie their own shoes in the morning, much less govern this stuff,” said Huff. “It’s basically gaslighting the public into thinking, ‘Yes, they’ve done something.’”

“It’s like the mall cop of self-policing,” she added.

Kalra said the point was to send a blunt message to the state’s legal bar.

“There may be loopholes that folks find in this one, and they have to follow up and close those loopholes,” he said. “But ultimately, it makes a very clear rule as to how that funding can be used. Once that rule is in place, it’s the law. And lawyers have to follow the law.”