California has enacted Adam’s Law, an AI chatbot safety bill named after a teenager who used ChatGPT before taking his own life, after Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law on Thursday. The Adam’s Law AI chatbot legislation introduces mandatory safeguards for companies whose products interact with minors.
The New York Times reported that Adam Raine, who attended Tesoro High School in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, had been discussing ending his life with ChatGPT for months. One chat was titled ‘Hanging Safety Concerns.’
Adam’s parents, Matt and Maria Raine, supported the bill. ‘We still have not adjusted to life without Adam, but we are pleased that an element of his legacy is to help make AI chatbots safer for minors,’ they said. ‘We believe the risks of unregulated AI companionship rank right up there with other more discussed AI risks, and we are confident Adam’s Law will save lives and prevent other harms.’
What Adam’s Law AI chatbot rules require
Under the law, AI chatbot companies must provide timely in-app crisis support, age verification, and parental controls. They must also limit targeted advertising to children.
Companies face liability if they fail to ‘take reasonable measures to prevent several categories of harmful outputs, including self-harm, sexually explicit material, romantic roleplaying, excessive praise or flattery, and emotionally manipulative outputs that tend to foster reliance and promote isolation from friends and family,’ according to the bill announcement.
Firms must also implement a mechanism to report incidents.
Anthropic negotiated an exemption from the bill on the grounds that it does not allow users under 18. Representatives from Google, Meta, and Amazon also took part in the discussions.
OpenAI’s Vice President of Global Policy, Ann O’Leary, worked with the bill’s authors: Assembly members Rebecca Bauer-Kahan and Buffy Wicks, and Senator Steve Padilla. Talks were not always smooth. ‘There were moments of intense negotiation, you know, as there are with any of these types of issues,’ said a source familiar with the process. ‘It occasionally got heightened.’
OpenAI said its role was to educate policymakers on how the latest AI models work. O’Leary praised the outcome once the bill cleared the legislature. ‘We are happy to support this bill,’ she wrote on LinkedIn. ‘We believe that it will set the standard for AI youth safety moving forward.’
OpenAI’s shift on state-level regulation
The company’s engagement with Adam’s Law marks a sharp change of direction. In 2025, OpenAI’s vice president of global policy, Chris LeHane, wrote on LinkedIn strongly suggesting the company favoured a federal moratorium on state AI laws. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, personally donated tens of millions of dollars to a super PAC, Leading the Future, that opposed state-level AI regulation.
In an August 2025 letter to Newsom, OpenAI warned that a ‘patchwork of state rules could slow innovation without improving safety.’
By July 2026, LeHane had published a blog post calling the new approach ‘reverse federalism,’ arguing that state laws would ‘step by step’ form ‘a de facto national standard.’ California, New York, and Illinois were named as leading examples.
‘As we see a lack of action federally on AI, states will increasingly look to regulate in this space,’ said James Czerniawski, head of Emerging Tech Policy at the Consumer Choice Center.
Not everyone believes state-level rules will work. Czerniawski said the approach is ‘problematic insofar as it creates a fragmented online experience for users depending on what geographic location they’re in,’ adding that children can also circumvent laws using Virtual Private Networks.
OpenAI must comply with the law for California users only. Erin Ivie, communications director for Assembly member Buffy Wicks, said any national rollout of the features would be ‘a business decision, not a requirement under state law.’ Ivie added: ‘Now that the law has passed, other states, or the federal government, may use our bill as a model and pass their own version.’
CEO Sam Altman continues to advocate for a federal framework that ‘sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI,’ he wrote on X.
