CALIFORNIA WILL NOW FINE PLATFORMS $1 MILLION PER KID, META'S BIG WORRY IS TEENS GETTING BORED

Gavin Newsom signed 13 bills Thursday at a children's museum outside San Francisco. The centerpiece is SB 1119, known as Adam's Law, named for Adam Raine, the California teen who died by suicide in 2025 after conversations with ChatGPT. His mother Maria Raine was at the signing with a photo of her son. The law makes companion chatbot operators run risk assessments before release, determine a user's age, notify parents in certain cases when a kid threatens self-harm, and set safety defaults only a parent can change. It takes effect in July 2027. Alongside it, AB 1709 bars platforms from feeding autoplay and recommendation algorithms to anyone under 16, and big platforms found negligent can be hit for up to $1 million per child. Meta's response was that the feed rules hurt its ability to deliver enjoyable content, with spokesperson Jim Cullinan saying personalization is part of what makes Facebook and Instagram valuable for teens. Weeks ago Meta settled with California and 28 other states over claims it deliberately built features to addict kids, so the timing on that defense is rough. Newsom then hedged. Hours after the ceremony he vetoed a stricter bill that would have kept chatbots away from under-18s entirely unless companies could guarantee no sexual talk and no self-harm encouragement. He also signed AI auditor bills Wednesday that Anthropic itself supported, potentially the only AI company that is in favor of regulation.

Why you should give a shit: California just wrote the country's first real rulebook for kids and chatbots, and the only number Meta will actually feel is the million dollars a head.