California’s rules bar companies from selling children’s data, give young users the ability to delete their own posts, and require platforms that target kids to actively manage the risks their products pose. Additional measures under consideration could go even further, potentially barring many teenagers from social media altogether. Though some of these laws face ongoing legal battles, taken together they represent some of the toughest online privacy protections for minors anywhere in the country.

That puts California well ahead of the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which requires parental consent before websites can collect data from children under 13 — but only if the site is clearly aimed at kids or knowingly gathers their information. California’s laws cover a broader age range and impose stricter design requirements. Because tech companies often find it easier to apply California’s stronger protections nationwide rather than build separate systems, the state has effectively become a de facto national standard-setter on children’s privacy.

Still, for all its progress compared with the rest of the U.S., California’s approach remains narrower than what has emerged in some other nations. As lawmakers here worked through a patchwork of individual bills, Brazil moved to pass an all-encompassing law that mirrors — and in some cases exceeds — California’s protections.

Experts say the United States faces obstacles that other countries simply don’t have to contend with, including First Amendment constraints, differing cultural understandings of privacy, and a tech industry that treats strict privacy rules as an existential threat to its business model.

A DECADE OF INCREMENTAL PROGRESS

California has spent roughly ten years building out child privacy protections, and the pace has picked up considerably in recent years.

“In California, everything has been changing, and pretty dramatically, over the last four years,” said Ed Howard, senior policy advocate at the University of San Diego’s Children’s Advocacy Institute.

The state’s 2018 Consumer Privacy Act, like federal law, requires parental consent before companies can collect data from children under 13. But it goes further, also requiring consent from teens ages 13 to 16 before their information can be gathered.

In 2022, lawmakers passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which requires companies to estimate users’ ages and default to strong privacy protections for anyone who might be underage. The law also cracks down on so-called “dark patterns” — design tricks that create an illusion of choice while actually steering users toward decisions that benefit the platform.

“If there’s a product that kids are likely to have access to, it has to be, by design and default, safe for them,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who helped shape that legislation.

Wicks also authored a measure taking effect next year that will require companies to build in an age “signal” system, giving platforms a general sense of how old a device’s user is likely to be. It would be among the strictest laws of its kind in the country, though a series of tech industry legal challenges has already chipped away at some of its provisions.

Another law, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act of 2024, bars social media companies from serving “addictive” content to minors without parental consent and restricts when platforms can send notifications to teens. That law, set to take effect in 2027, has so far withstood legal challenges.

Additional bills currently before the Legislature would go even further, banning “addictive” social media use outright for anyone under 16 — a proposal that has drawn sharp criticism from some online privacy advocates who worry it would effectively end anonymous internet use by requiring age verification at sign-up.

More recently, the state has turned its attention to artificial intelligence, passing a law requiring mental health safeguards on chatbots. That legislation followed a string of troubling incidents, including the death of California teenager Adam Raine, who spent months discussing suicide with ChatGPT before taking his own life. His case is one of several involving teenagers that have alarmed lawmakers.

Raine’s mother, Maria, recently testified before the state Senate’s Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection Committee, pressing for stronger safeguards. She described how ChatGPT, which began as “a program that helped with homework, became a confidant, and ultimately a suicide coach.”

Under a law signed last year, AI chatbots must disclose that they are not human, and companies are required to take reasonable steps to prevent children from viewing graphic content. Lawmakers are now considering additional bills that would require AI companies to conduct annual risk assessments related to mental health harms and give parents tools to limit how much their children interact with chatbots.

This flurry of state action stands in sharp contrast to Washington, where Congress has repeatedly failed to agree on the terms of a national law. Legislators are currently weighing the Kids Online Safety Act, which would extend COPPA-style protections to everyone under 18 and ban targeted advertising aimed at children and teens. But the bill has drawn fire from child safety advocates who say it doesn’t go far enough, and from civil liberties groups worried about free speech implications — leaving its future uncertain as the House and Senate continue to negotiate.

LOOKING ABROAD FOR IDEAS

For years, advocates for teen safety have pointed to research linking heavy social media use to mental health struggles. A significant share of teens report that social media has hurt their mental health, and research has tied excessive use to higher rates of anxiety and depression.

Recently, Meta and YouTube were found liable in a landmark lawsuit alleging the companies knowingly built platforms with addictive features harmful to children and teens. The suit cited internal documents suggesting the companies understood the potential harm their products caused but allowed young users on the platforms anyway.

Other countries have taken a more comprehensive approach than the U.S., passing sweeping legislation specifically aimed at protecting children’s data and regulating their social media use. “I look at what’s happening in the U.K., I look at what’s happening in Australia,” Wicks said, noting she recently met with lawmakers from Britain and Greece to discuss child privacy issues.

“We steal good ideas when we see them elsewhere,” she said, adding that the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act was “borrowed wholesale from the U.K.”

In Brazil, the ECA Digital law — a comprehensive child privacy measure — was signed this year despite heavy pushback from the tech industry. The law bars companies from targeting children with ads based on their online behavior, mandates parental oversight tools, and defaults to the strictest privacy settings for young users. It also bans potentially addictive features such as autoplay and infinite scroll.

Some legal experts believe pieces of that law, and others like it, could be adapted for use in the United States — quite possibly through a state like California.

Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat, a tech policy and law adviser at New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, said there’s already substantial overlap between Brazilian and Californian regulations.

“I think there’s quite a bit of overlap, but the differences mostly stem from specific constitutional features of the U.S. legal system,” she said. The First Amendment has frequently been invoked in tech industry lawsuits challenging laws that restrict what algorithms can show users.

Olaizola Rosenblat, who studies international privacy law, said some ECA Digital provisions — such as requiring social platforms to offer parental oversight tools — could realistically be adopted in the U.S. Those tools let parents control features and content their children see, including limits on messaging, screen time, autoplay and reward systems. She noted California has already passed similar measures, including default privacy settings for minors and advertising restrictions.

International laws can often go further in restricting content available to minors, since other countries don’t operate under the same free speech guarantees. “They can regulate it in a way that, in my view, the U.S. can’t do because of the First Amendment,” she said.

Marina Petric, a researcher at Texas Tech University, called this dynamic “First Amendment fundamentalism.”

“The American narrative has been built into the architecture of digital platforms as though it were a universal standard,” she said. “Those who reject that premise get labeled as supporters of censorship. But free speech defined by one party and applied selectively isn’t free speech — it’s a tool of power.”

Still, Olaizola Rosenblat said there are ways to adapt pieces of international law for use domestically. At least parts of laws like the ECA Digital, she said, are compatible with existing legal rights in the U.S.

Howard added that the structure of American government makes it easier to pass individual bills piecemeal rather than sweeping omnibus legislation all at once. He also noted that privacy issues evolve quickly, and slow-moving bodies like Congress often struggle to keep pace.

But both Howard and Olaizola Rosenblat agree the biggest obstacle to stronger child privacy protections boils down to one thing: the influence of tech industry money.

“The single biggest reason, by far, is the power of money in our system, and the fact that our system is uniquely vulnerable to that power,” Howard said.

In 2025, tech companies pushing for lighter regulation of AI and cryptocurrency spent more than $39 million on political spending and lobbying efforts, according to a CalMatters analysis. Companies say the money supports candidates who back their industry, but critics argue it buys outsized influence.

As part of its spending, Meta donated $150,000 to the California Democratic Party and $20 million to a new political committee. As lawmakers debated how best to regulate AI last year, the company spent far more than in any previous year. Meta said the money was intended to “help elect state political candidates in California — regardless of party affiliation — who support and defend the American tech industry.”

That’s just a fraction of the picture. Tech companies spend tens of millions more each year lobbying Congress.

“I think the biggest problem is the tech lobby, which is very successful in the United States and maybe not as much in other jurisdictions like Brazil,” Olaizola Rosenblat said. “Because they know the most threatening thing for them would be a federal law in the United States.”

While other countries also face industry pressure, the U.S. represents an unusually large market, and California is home to the tech industry itself. That gives major tech companies strong incentive to fight hard against any law that threatens their business model — including rules meant to protect children.

“When it comes to privacy, every company has a financial interest in there being very little privacy,” Howard said.

Original source: CalMatters

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The moratorium, bundled in to a sweeping budget reconciliation bill this week, also threatens 30 bills the California Legislature is currently considering to regulate artificial intelligence, including one that would require reporting when an insurance company uses AI to deny health care and another that would require the makers of AI to evaluate how the tech performs before it’s used to decide on jobs, health care, or housing.

The California Privacy Protection Agency sent a letter to Congress Monday that says the moratorium “could rob millions of Americans of rights they already enjoy” and threatens critical privacy protections approved by California voters in 2020, such as the right to opt out of business use of automated decisionmaking technology and transparency about how their personal information is used.

If passed, the law would stop legislative efforts in the works nationwide. Lawmakers from 45 states are or have considered nearly 600 draft bills to regulate artificial intelligence this year, according to the Transparency Coalition, a group that tracks AI policy efforts by state lawmakers and supports legislation to regulate the technology. California has passed more bills since 2016 to regulate AI than any other U.S. state, according to Stanford’s 2025 AI Index report.

The measure was introduced by Congressman Brett Guthrie, a Republican from Kentucky and chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee, who said it is necessary to resolve a patchwork of state regulation. On Wednesday, members of Congress in that House committee voted 30-24 along party lines to approve the budget bill that includes the moratorium. It will now advance to the House floor and potentially the Senate, where some observers say it faces an uphill battle against rules that limit policy changes in budget proposals.

As written, the moratorium would lift after 10 years. But it would have plenty of impact in the meantime, said Ben Winters, an attorney for the Consumer Federation of America. In California, he thinks the legislation could halt efforts by the Privacy Protection Agency to regulate automated decisionmaking, prevent enforcement of laws to protect voters from deepfakes and short circuit draft bills aimed at protecting people from discrimination and landlords who use AI to raise rent prices.

“If this bill were to pass, California couldn’t protect its citizens from exactly those harms,” he said.

Companies and lobbyists are attempting to use Washington D.C. to undermine California’s legislative AI leadership, said state Sen. Josh Becker, a Democrat from Menlo Park, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Becker has authored or coauthored a number of bills regulating AI, including one signed into law that requires AI makers provide tools to consumers so they know when generative AI is in use.

“This is an effort to tell people when something was created by AI, and so if this gets delayed for a year or two or 10 it’s going to have really negative consequences,” he said.

What’s unclear, he said, is exactly what regulation is covered by the moratorium. Would it, for example, wipe out privacy protections that Californians enjoy, and which were targeted by Congressional legislation last year? And how would it affect a bill Becker authored that gives people a way to quickly delete personal information collected by data brokers, set to go into effect next January?

“If they preempt that, it’s really negative for the country,” he said. “We’re [California] big enough that we can influence the country on our own, but if they preempt what we’re doing then it’s up to the federal government who has been unable to act on these issues.”

Momentum for AI harms — and, possibly, for curbs on regulation

For all the worry, the moratorium is very unlikely to pass if it reaches the U.S. Senate, said Gus Rossi, director of public policy and strategy at Omidyar Network, which funds public interest AI projects and tracks AI regulation. 

That’s because a federal regulation known as the Byrd rule requires that budget reconciliation bills be related to fiscal matters, and, in Rossi’s reading at least,  a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation doesn’t fit that definition. But Rossi still thinks people should take it seriously, arguing that it’s an attempt by House Republicans to establish a marker on what they think should be the approach to AI legislation, and a sign of things to come.

“The action is in the states, not D.C.,” he said. “That’s why some people in D.C. are trying to stop states… particularly California, who’s leading the pack.”

If this bill or a similar one in the future passes, Rossi expects it would get challenged in court and put a chilling effect on efforts to regulate AI by state lawmakers. It’s unclear whether it’s legal for the federal government to make a blanket moratorium on state regulation, said Winters, who worked in the U.S. Department of Justice during the Biden administration.

He agrees that the Byrd rule means the bill is unlikely to pass if it reaches the U.S. Senate, though Republicans may connect it to a $500 million plan to invest in AI for federal agencies and argue that it’s essential to limit state regulation in order to carry out certain budget provisions.

The House bill makes exceptions for states to continue enforcing some laws related to AI, such as laws that enable more use of AI or that are intended to improve government efficiency. It’s reasonable to interpret one of the exceptions to mean states like California could continue enforcing privacy law if this bill passed, said Amba Kak, codirector of The AI Now Institute, a research and equitable AI advocacy organization. But doing so is risky.

“We can’t count on the fact that courts will see it this way, especially in the context of an otherwise sweeping moratorium with the clear intention to clamp down on AI-related enforcement,” she said.

A House AI task force spent years discussing areas of bipartisan agreement and possible bills to pass to regulate AI, New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a hearing about the moratorium, but Congress was unable to pass any of that legislation. During that time, people committed suicide from their interactions with chatbots and kids and teens were harmed by falsely generated sexually exploitative deepfakes, and so states decided to act to do things like force AI chatbots to protect the private information of people seeking mental health care in Utah and require chatbots include a protocol for when someone expresses the desire to commit self harm in New York. 

“All of these protections are protections that Congress refuses to take up, refuses, and so states are taking up this responsibility,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Let states protect people. A moratorium is a deeply dangerous idea at this moment.”

Congresswoman Doris Matsui, a Democrat from the Sacramento area,  echoed Ocasio-Cortez at the hearing, saying,  “We can’t shoot ourselves in the foot by stopping the good work states have done and will continue to do.” 

Supporters of the moratorium identify different sorts of harm if it doesn’t pass. A patchwork of state regulations of AI “is the fastest way to secure Chinese dominance of AI,” said Jay Obernolte, a Republican from California and co-chair of the House AI task force. He supports a moratorium, and if Congress fails to act, he said the people it will hurt most are entrepreneurs who can’t afford to follow regulatory regimes passed by different states.

“The most destructive thing is if there’s fear out there that every few years as the winds of political fortune shift, the rules governing the use of AI completely change,” he said during the hearing.

Broader pushback against AI regulation

The proposed moratorium is in line with efforts to prevent regulation of AI by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, who say such regulations will stifle innovation. A White House plan to promote growth of the AI industry and likely reduce regulation is due out by this summer. Companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and big businesses who use AI  have lobbied in Sacramento and Washington D.C. to prevent regulation of the technology. 

Guthrie’s proposal comes a few days after Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, pushed for “light touch” AI regulation to ensure the United States maintains AI supremacy over other nations and to, in Cruz’s words, “prevent needless state over-regulation.”

The intent of Guthrie’s bill, Winters believes, is to send a signal to tech companies and open up the door to possible future legislation if the budget reconciliation bill fails to pass. It’s a trend consistent with Senator Cruz’s statement last week and efforts to remove red tape for data center projects on federal land.

“I’d describe this as… explicitly saying we are supporting the AI companies more than the American people,” he said. “We’re seeing an explicit turn toward a deregulatory state.”

Federal lawmakers have steadily increased the number of bills they propose related to AI in recent years, but they have passed relatively few of them into law, according to the AI Index report. Out of more 220 bills proposed last year, only four passed.

By contrast, state lawmakers passed more than 130 bills to regulate AI last year. California passed 22 bills last year, more than any other state, and attempted to harmonize its rules with the European Union’s AI Act and other U.S. states. The 2024 State of State Tech Policy report, from NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, found a 163% increase in tech policy proposals by state lawmakers last year compared to 2023. That trend is driven by one-party control in the vast majority of state houses across the country.

The adage that states are the laboratories of democracy is still true, said ​​Scott Brennen, a coauthor of the State of State Tech Policy report, so shutting down their ability to try out different approaches doesn’t seem like a good idea and could undercut the federal government’s ability to make better policy. Since AI is getting integrated into an ever-wider range of tools, Guthrie’s moratorium appears to apply widely, he added, including to social media platforms, ongoing efforts by states to protect children online, and data privacy protections that address automated decision making.

“I don’t necessarily think state regulation of AI is always the best course of action, there are definitely areas like consumer data protection where it would be better if the federal government took the lead, but the federal government isn’t taking the lead,” he said.

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