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SACRAMENTO – Today, State Senator Steve Padilla (D-San Diego) issued the following statement in response to OpenAI and Common Sense Media reaching an agreement on comprehensive chatbot safety regulations that builds upon last year’s SB 243 to protect children and other vulnerable users:

“Today, we’re witnessing a significant breakthrough between child advocates and tech leaders to improve child safety online. The proposed safeguards for chatbot technology are an important step forward to protect children through enhanced parental controls and age verification, auditing provisions, and disrupting addictive patterns embedded within chatbots. I want to thank Jim Steyer and Bruce Reed at Common Sense Media and the leaders of OpenAI for working together to create durable safeguards for children and to the Governor for pushing and nudging the parties to keep talking and working to forge these critical new protections.

While this is an important milestone, there’s more work to be done and I continue to believe this issue should be tackled by the Legislature and Governor through a public process inviting all stakeholders to participate. Given the rapidly evolving nature of this technology, we also shouldn’t put this law into the Constitution as proposed in the updated initiative – doing so would create an unnecessarily high-bar to revise and update that law in the future. Moreover, legislative hearings will provide the broader public an opportunity to comment and provide input on this important issue.

Therefore, I urge Common Sense Media, OpenAI and leaders in both houses to come together and commit to quick, but thorough, action on this topic. I look forward to working with the Assembly’s champion on this issue and Chair of Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, and the Senate’s newly-appointed Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection Committee Chair, Christopher Cabaldon, to enshrine additional child protections into law.”

Senator Padilla’s Senate Bill 243, the first-of-its-kind law in the nation, requires chatbot operators to implement critical, reasonable, and attainable safeguards around interactions with artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and provide families with a private right to pursue legal actions against noncompliant and negligent developers. At the time Governor Newsom signed SB 243, he urged the tech industry and child advocates to continue negotiations to strengthen and improve upon that measure.

Already this year, several measures to advance and strengthen SB 243 have been introduced including Senator Padilla’s Senate Bill 300 to:

• Bring age verification protocol in line with California’s landmark law, requiring chatbot operators to adhere to a stricter standard
• Require operators to prevent chatbots from producing or facilitating the exchange of any sexually explicit material or proposing any sexually explicit content in interactions with minors

Senator Padilla also introduced Senate Bill 867, a 4-year moratorium on the sale and manufacture of toys with AI chatbots embedded in them, the first-in-the-nation, to allow safety regulations to be developed to ensure children’s safety.

To learn more about Senator Padilla’s continued efforts to create common sense regulations around AI chatbots, click here and here.

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Steve Padilla represents the 18th Senate District, which includes the communities of Chula Vista, the Coachella Valley, Imperial Beach, the Imperial Valley, National City, and San Diego. Prior to his election to the Senate in 2022, Senator Padilla was the first person of color ever elected to city office in Chula Vista, the first Latino Mayor, and the first openly LGBT person to serve or be elected to city office. Website of Senator Steve Padilla: https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/