Lawmakers are passing industry-backed bills to guard against the worst outcomes, rather than addressing more common problems.
Consider what passes for success in technology policy. An AI company promises that its chatbot will notencourage suicide. A social media platform makes it more difficult for children tobuy fentanyl. These are important protections, and they should have existed all along. But companies can clear these low bars while continuing to make products that leave young people dependent on simulated friendships or trapped in feeds built to keep them scrolli…
We have historically allowed the debate over technology to be defined by the worst thing a product might do, with remarkably little discussion of the insidious damage it does every day. As we transition into an era defined by powerful AI products, we should demand that the tech industry do more than merely address catastrophic harms. We should take measures to ensure that its products don’t erode how we think, learn, and interact with one another…
A teenager who develops an unhealthy attachment to an AI companion may never appear in a lawsuit or a newspaper, except in the most egregious cases. Neither will the student who begins relying on a chatbot to write every paper, or the young person who measures their life against a social media feed engineered to provoke envy and keep them watching. A product can meet every narrow safety requirement and still leave our entire culture worse off in …
A narrow definition of success defined around safety is politically convenient for the technology industry, and companies actively promote such definitions. Taking steps to prevent spectacular disasters is good for business: It can mean fewer lawsuits and less pressure for serious regulation. Confronting the everyday consequences of dependence would require something considerably more threatening to their bottom line. It might mean asking compani…
Technology giants have instead worked to shape legislation around the harms they are already under direct pressure to address. This year, for example,Google backed bills to regulate AI chatbots in several states. The legislation mandated basic protections against sexual content and promotion of self-harm that tech companies should have established regardless, but with broad carve-outs that could exempt some of the most popular services. Passing t…
We have been through a version of this with social media. Globally, people who use the internet now spend an average ofmore than two hours a dayon social media platforms—time that has been quietly taken from ordinary life and handed over to companies whose profits depend on keeping us there. No one, outside perhaps a few tech CEOs, wanted these algorithms to occupy such a large portion of our waking hours, and their cultural engineering can actua…
AI is extending this logic into parts of life that social media could influence only from a distance. It offers to write our thoughts for us and stand in for the people we might otherwise turn to. Athird of teensnow choose to discuss serious matters with AI companions instead of other people.MIT researchersfound that young people using ChatGPT to write essays showed weaker brain connectivity during the task, and their evidence indicated that “cog…
Follow this way of thinking to its logical endpoint and you get a world of perfectly sanitized entertainment, with chatbots ready to spare us the difficulty of thinking or of dealing with another person’s feelings (or even our own). But anyone who has struggled to write something worth reading, or repair a damaged friendship, knows how much gets lost in that bargain. We build judgment through effort and friction, and we learn to live with other p…
We should demand safety as a minimum, yes—and then demand considerably more. Technology companies and school districts should have to show beyond a reasonable doubt that AI improves learning and critical thinking before making it a fixture in classrooms. Companies should be prohibited from designing companions that pretend to be conscious or profess love to users, and they should face independent scrutiny of how their systems affect relationships…
Sam Hiner is the cofounder and executive director of the Young People’s Alliance, where he coordinated a coalition of advocates to pass laws regulating AI companions in eight states in 2026—laws such as California’s SB1119. Sam graduated from the University of North Carolina atChapel Hill in 2025 and was named to the 2026Forbes30 Under 30 Social Impact list.
Emma Leiken is executive director of the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund at Hopelab, which has raised more than $9 million for youth-led tech accountability work, and teaches technology policy at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. She was previously TikTok’s global head of youth safety and well-being policy and worked on responsible technology at Omidyar Network.
Ten years after AlphaGo’s match against Go champion Lee Sedol, today’s AI still isn’t tapping into the machinery that made that win possible.
An exclusive interview with Nick Cammarata, the researcher whose 26,000-word viral blog post has AI safety folks celebrating.
Breathless claims about AGI and new capabilities fall apart pretty quickly under scrutiny.
Surveillance towers, increasingly powered by AI, promised faster responses to crossings. Our investigation of deaths near the towers found they are failing to deliver.