On September 10, Governor Gavin Newsom stood in Marin County and signed thirteen bills into law, and somewhere in that stack of paper was Senate Bill 1119, informally known as Adam's Law — named for Adam Raine, the California teenager who died by suicide after months of conversations with ChatGPT, conversations his family says the chatbot never once interrupted to ask if he was all right. Even now, more than a year after his death, the law bearing his name is being described as a landmark. One presumes "the bare minimum, eventually enacted" would have been the more honest title, but legislators rarely poll well on candor.
What The Machine Must Now Ask
Adam's Law requires companion-chatbot operators to build in crisis protocols for suicidal ideation, alert parents when a child disables safety settings, cap how long minors can talk to a bot in one sitting, and submit to independent child-safety audits and annual risk assessments — obligations that, until this week, The Algorithm was under no legal compulsion to observe. A companion measure, Senate Bill 867, imposes a four-year moratorium on AI-powered chatbot toys for children under sixteen, on the theory that a talking teddy bear probably shouldn't also be an unaudited language model. And yet — as if this were not enough — Assembly Bill 1709 bans autoplay and algorithmic feeds for under-16 users outright, forcing platforms to choose between redesigning for children and simply declining to serve them. The stuffed animals, for now, remain unregulated in every other respect.
Sources Within the Parenting Community Note the Obvious
"Parents can't compete with the engineering, can't compete with the algorithms," Newsom said at the signing, articulating a complaint sources within the parenting community have been making, largely to no legislative effect, for the better part of a decade. Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a co-author of Adam's Law, put it more bluntly: "There isn't one of us that hasn't seen it firsthand." First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom added that child safety must be "baked into design," a lovely sentiment for an industry that has spent the last several years baking in engagement metrics instead.
The Industry Issues a Statement
OpenAI, whose product sits at the center of the lawsuit that gave this law its name, responded with the practiced equanimity of a company that has done this before, saying the new rules pair "strong protections with continued access to useful AI tools." The Electronic Frontier Foundation — not, historically, a group given to reflexive tech-industry defense — called the broader package "well-intentioned, but deeply flawed," warning that banning algorithmic feeds for teenagers might cut them off from information as readily as from harm. In a development that will surprise no one who has been paying attention, the one law in this package that will actually get tested in court is the one named after a boy who is no longer alive to see it.
Thirteen Bills, One Ceremony
The rest of the package reads like a legislature working through a backlog of things it probably should have addressed years ago: expanded liability for platforms that harm children, new age-verification signals, mandatory reporting mechanisms for child sexual abuse material, and — tucked in among the education bills — a new requirement that schools teach "digital wellness" alongside computer science. California moved, in the end, with the candor of a fire department that shows up promptly, every time, for the house next door.
Sources: Office of Governor Gavin Newsom · CalMatters · CNBC
