Category: 3. Business

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/

Certain cheese products are being recalled due to a possible Listeria contamination, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Around 11,530 products from The Ambriola company, under names such as Boar’s Head and Member’s Mark, are being pulled from several states, including Texas.

No illnesses have been reported in connection with this recall, and no other products are affected, the FDA stated.

The recalled cheese was distributed between Nov. 3- 25, 2025.

“We take food safety very seriously and immediately alerted stores and distributors to remove the affected products from shelves,” said Phil Marfuggi, chief executive officer. “We are working closely with the FDA and continuing to test our products and facilities to fully understand the situation.”

If you have one of the products, the FDA said you can either return it to the store where you bought it for a refund or throw it away.

Owners with questions can contact Ambriola at 1-800-962-8224, Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Listeria monocytogenes can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in children, older adults and those with weakened immune systems.

Pregnant women are also at risk, as the infection can cause miscarriages and stillbirths, the FDA said.

Short-term symptoms in healthy individuals include high fever, severe headaches, abdominal pain, diarrhea and nausea.

You can find the specific products and expiration dates here.

Read more on KSAT:

The bank component of the financing involved a credit agreement providing for new senior secured credit facilities consisting of a USD1bn senior secured term loan “A” facility, a USD2bn senior secured term loan “B” facility and a USD500 million senior secured revolving credit facility. The bond piece consisted of Rule 144A/Regulation S offerings of USD1.5bn aggregated principal amount of 6.250% Senior Secured Notes due 2032 and USD1bn aggregated principal amount of 7.250% Senior Notes due 2033. 

Genmab is an international biotechnology company dedicated to improving the lives of people with cancer and other serious diseases through innovative antibody medicines. For over 25 years, its passionate, innovative and collaborative team has advanced a broad range of antibody-based therapeutic formats, including bispecific antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, immune-modulating antibodies and other next-generation modalities. Genmab’s science powers eight approved antibody medicines, and the company is advancing a strong late-stage clinical pipeline, including wholly owned programs, with the goal of delivering transformative medicines to patients.

The A&O Shearman team was led by partners Harald Halbhuber (New York, capital markets), Michael Chernick (New York, debt finance) and Ryan Robski (Toronto/New York, capital markets), and associates Katya Bogdanov (Toronto/New York, capital markets), Ilya Mamin, Joe Tambasco (both New York, capital markets), Nick Slagter and Jahanvi Pandit (both Toronto/New York, capital markets) and Penelope Yan, Becky Hval, Jordan Tan (all New York, debt finance).

Other A&O Shearman lawyers involved in the transaction include partners Derrick Lott and Clare O’Brien (both New York, M&A), Larry Crouch (Silicon Valley, tax), Matthew Brown (Washington D.C., tax), Niels de Ru (Amsterdam, debt finance), Godfried Kinnegim and Rens Bondrager (both Amsterdam, tax), and associates Katherine Teng and Jake Shaughnessy (both New York, M&A), Daniel Kachmar and Brandon Fawbush (Washington D.C., tax), Joy Kloosterman (Amsterdam, tax), Sophia Evenhuis and Michaël Guenneguez (both Amsterdam, global financial markets), Mercedeh Naseri (Amsterdam, debt finance), Sy Ro (New York, funds) and Stephanie Li (Washington D.C., funds).

Firm News  |  January 9, 2026

Gibson Dunn advised Diginex Limited, a leading provider of Sustainability RegTech and data management solutions, on the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire PlanA.earth GmbH, one of Europe’s leading AI-powered carbon accounting and decarbonization platforms.

Our corporate team includes partners Robert Giannattasio and Christopher Lang.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said his risky US gamble on Argentina’s currency has paid off.

Bessent said American financial support had been repaid and the US no longer held any Argentine pesos in its exchange stabilisation fund.

The US had purchased the then-plunging currency last year in an effort to stave off further turmoil and boost the party of President Javier Milei, a key ally of President Donald Trump, in the run-up to national midterm elections.

The move sparked criticism from Democrats, who accused Bessent of risking taxpayer money on a country with a long history of financial turmoil.

In the end, Bessent said the manoeuvre had been a success.

“Stabilising a strong American ally – and making tens of millions in profit for Americans – is an America First homerun deal,” he wrote in an announcement on social media.

When the US moved to intervene in September, people were dumping the peso, mindful of the shocks they had experienced after previous elections and rattled by signs that Milei’s party might experience an upset in the mid-terms.

Bessent promised to do “what was needed” to stave off further drops in September. He announced a month later that the US had purchased pesos and agreed to extend a swap line to Argentina, allowing the country to exchange pesos for dollars.

The move helped to halt the falls in the currency, which saw further gains after Milei’s party clinched a landslide victory in the mid-term elections, though it has drifted lower more recently.

Argentina’s central bank said it settled the swap line in December. It ultimately traded just $2.5bn in pesos for dollars of a possible $20bn, according to a government report on deal.

The report said the US had also separately provided $872m in support involving reserves held at the IMF.

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on that transaction.

“Getting your money back is a straight forward definition of a success,” said Brad Setser, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, even if he said tens of millions in profit was “small change” given the sums involved.

But he said big challenges continue to face the Argentine economy, given how much it spent last year from its reserves to prop up the currency.

“It’s been a short term success – Bessent got his money back,” he said. “I do remain worried that the Argentines are relying too heavily on the expectation that Secretary Bessent will ride to the rescue … and therefore aren’t showing enough urgency in their plans to rebuild their own reserves.”