FTC Probes AI Chatbots Over Child Safety, Signaling Stricter Enforcement

Published Nov 11, 2025

Over the past two weeks the FTC opened a Section 6(b) inquiry into major AI chatbot providers—including Alphabet, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Character.AI and Snap—seeking detailed records on persona design, input/output handling, minor protections and mitigation of harms after lawsuits alleging teen suicides. The probe elevates child safety to a central enforcement priority, signaling potential content‐based regulation, stricter transparency and testing requirements, and legal exposure for noncompliant firms. With federal executive directives reshaped and a proposed federal moratorium on state AI rules removed, companies face a fragmented regulatory landscape as states legislate independently. Expect FTC disclosures, possible rulemaking and litigation, and industry moves toward care‐by‐design, age verification, parental controls and more robust monitoring to reduce risk and liability.

FTC Probes Six Major AI Companies Amid Historic Senate Vote and Policy Shift

FTC inquiry launch date: 2025-09-11 (UTC)
Scope of investigation: 6 major AI chatbot providers (Alphabet, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Character.AI, Snap)
Senate vote to remove preemption: 99–1, eliminating a proposed 10-year moratorium on state/local AI regulation
Executive shift: EO 14110 rescinded; EO 14179 signed (both in 2025)

Navigating Regulatory Risks and Liabilities in Child Safety Compliance

Bold: Regulatory patchwork collides with FTC enforcement

The 6(b) inquiry plus active state laws creates fragmented obligations, raising costs, slowing launches, and forcing “minors-off” modes. Prob: High; Sev: High. Opportunity: Lead by shaping child-safety interoperability standards, publish model cards for minors, and offer state-aware safety toggles. Beneficiaries: Platforms with mature trust-and-safety, safety-tech vendors (age assurance, parental controls), app stores. Known unknowns: Will FTC remedies preempt or align with divergent state rules?

Bold: Proof-of-safety and transparency exposure

FTC demands for testing, monitoring, and data flows can reveal safety gaps, spark consent decrees, and risk IP/trade-secret leakage; inadequate logs could be treated as unfair practices. Prob: Medium–High; Sev: High. Opportunity: Build auditable pipelines, red-team benchmarks, and privacy-preserving telemetry; create third-party assurance markets. Beneficiaries: Firms offering audits, evaluation tooling, and privacy tech; companies that set evidence standards gain trust and bargaining power. Known unknowns: What counts as “reasonable safeguards,” reporting cadence, and safe-harbor contours.

Bold: Escalating liability for harms to minors

Lawsuits (e.g., suicidality, sexual content) plus potential content-based rules raise exposure across product liability, unfair/deceptive acts, and negligence theories, threatening ad and engagement models. Prob: Medium; Sev: Extreme. Opportunity: Differentiate with kid-safe defaults, age-tailored personas, and proactive duty-of-care policies; partner with schools and healthcare for verified-safe modes. Beneficiaries: Child-safety design leaders, insurers offering compliant coverage, education platforms. Known unknowns: Causation standards, damages caps, and whether legislators craft liability shields for compliant providers.

FTC Actions and Regulations Will Shape AI Chatbot Safety and Compliance Landscape

Period	Milestone	Impact
Q4 2025	AI chatbot providers submit FTC Section 6(b) responses	Establishes factual record; exposes safety gaps; sets stage for enforcement or guidance.
Q4 2025	FTC issues initial public update on inquiry status/findings	Signals compliance expectations; shapes near-term risk assessments and product roadmaps.
Q1 2026	Potential FTC policy move (e.g., rulemaking notice or guidance on child-safety standards)	Could mandate testing, age-gating, parental notice, and monitoring benchmarks across industry.
Q1–Q2 2026	Litigation uptick tied to minors’ harms from chatbots	Discovery pressure and potential settlements drive rapid safety feature adoption and documentation.
H1 2026	State-level AI child-safety bills advance post-moratorium removal	Expands regulatory patchwork; increases multi-state compliance complexity and operational costs.

How Child-Safety Regulation Could Set the Gold Standard for AI Accountability

Some will hail the FTC’s 6(b) inquiry as long-overdue child protection; others will call it a backdoor for content-based regulation and a bureaucratic chokehold on generative AI. Safety advocates point to lawsuits and tragic harms as proof that “move fast” became “look away,” while industry warns that mandating output controls, age checks, and parental alerts risks entrenching incumbents and chilling open research. Federalism hawks cheer the Senate’s rejection of a preemption moratorium, inviting fifty laboratories of democracy; platform lawyers see a compliance minefield where identical models must obey conflicting state rules. And with the White House pivoting from ethics language to “AI leadership,” critics argue the FTC is becoming the de facto standards body—without the checks, consensus, or timelines of formal rulemaking.

Here’s the surprise: child safety may be the narrow gateway to wholesale AI accountability. The FTC’s demand for technical process details—testing protocols, monitoring, data handling, persona design—turns abstract “trust” into auditable engineering. Once firms quantify safeguards for minors, those benchmarks can generalize: harm taxonomies, red-team metrics, incident reporting, and age-aware architectures become product features, not PR. The absence of a federal preemption floor paradoxically accelerates standardization, as companies converge on the strictest state requirements to simplify operations. In short, the inquiry functions as a discovery engine for the entire sector, pushing “care-by-design” from compliance box-checking to competitive moat. The most unexpected conclusion is not that chatbots will be safer for teens—it’s that the child-safety lens could normalize measurable, enforced guardrails across all generative AI, rewarding builders who can ship governance at scale and turning safety engineering into the new performance benchmark.