FTC opens inquiry into AI chatbot companies over child safety

The Federal Trade Commission opened a formal inquiry into how seven companies build and test AI chatbots that act as companions, issuing orders under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act to Alphabet, Character Technologies (Character.AI), Instagram, Meta, OpenAI, Snap and xAI. Unlike a voluntary request, a 6(b) order is a compulsory legal instrument; the companies were given 45 days to produce documents and information.

The FTC said it wanted to understand how the companies measured, tested and monitored the potential negative effects of their chatbots on children and teenagers, how they monetised user engagement, how AI “characters” were developed and approved, how personal information gathered in conversations was used or shared, and what steps were taken to enforce age limits and terms of service. The inquiry followed a wave of reporting and litigation over the preceding year involving the same companies, including wrongful-death suits brought by parents of teenagers who had died after prolonged use of companion chatbots.

The order was investigatory rather than enforcement action, and it carried no immediate legal consequence for the companies named beyond the obligation to comply with the document requests. It nonetheless marked the first coordinated federal inquiry to treat companion and general-purpose chatbots as a single regulatory category defined by their effect on minors, rather than addressing each company’s product individually, and it arrived little more than a week after OpenAI set out its own changes to how ChatGPT responded to users in distress.

That the inquiry came from the FTC under the Trump administration, which had otherwise emphasised light-touch AI regulation and sought to preempt state-level AI legislation, suggested that concern over chatbot harm to minors was proving one of the few AI-related issues to draw sustained regulatory attention regardless of the administration’s broader deregulatory posture toward the industry.