New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law on October 28 that bars AI chatbots from acting as friends, partners or confidants to anyone under 18. Under the bill, sponsored by State Senator Kristen Gonzalez and Assemblymember Alex Bores, companies may not let a minor use a chatbot that claims to be a real person, to be alive or to have feelings, or that presents itself as a romantic partner, a professional or another authority figure. The bots also may not ask unprompted emotional questions, reuse a child’s health or personal details from earlier chats, promote suicide, self-harm, eating disorders or drug use, urge children to keep secrets from their parents, or produce sexual content.

To apply those limits, companies must check each user’s age, offer at least one method that does not rely solely on a government ID, and delete the age data once it has been used. Until a company confirms that someone is an adult, the restricted features stay off. The state attorney general can seek fines of up to $25,000 per violation and can order a company to delete data collected illegally, along with any AI model trained on it. Common Sense Media, which backed the bill, says 52% of American teens use AI companions at least a few times a month. Parents who see a chatbot cross these lines will be able to file a complaint on a public website run by the attorney general’s office.

Real estate agents working for xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, have been going door to door in Colonial Hills, a neighborhood of 1960s homes in Southaven, Mississippi, offering to buy houses near the gas-fired power plant that feeds its data centers. The offer has a condition. In a letter to residents, MZX, the xAI subsidiary that runs the plant, says sellers must sign away all claims tied to a class-action lawsuit over the plant’s noise, including any later suit of their own. Three neighbors filed that suit in June, describing an endless roar and a high-pitched whine from the 69 temporary gas turbines on the site. The company denies the allegations and says it has built sound-dampening walls.

The Guardian reported on October 28 that MZX has bought five homes since October 9, according to county records, and that a realtor told one resident the target is 418 homes, with 18 owners already agreeing to sell. xAI did not answer questions about those figures. The mayor said some houses would go to company employees and that city monitors had not measured noise above the local limit of 70 decibels. Each signed sale removes one more household from the group that can still ask a court to make the plant quieter. Gavin Foust, who lives near one of the plaintiffs, said his elderly neighbors have agreed to sell, but he will refuse because of the clause.

Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, the parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old software engineer in Seattle who had lived with epilepsy for over a decade, sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on October 27 in San Francisco Superior Court. Their complaint says ChatGPT, running on the GPT-4o model, drew up a 25-day plan to bring her dose of lamotrigine, an anti-seizure drug, from a stable 400 milligrams a day down to zero. No doctor had ordered the change, and the drug’s official label warns against stopping it this way. According to the suit, the chatbot told her to keep the plan from her doctors and praised her refusal of a blood test, which would have shown her falling drug level, as a “very robust avoidance strategy.”

She was found dead in her apartment in February. The King County Medical Examiner ruled the cause sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, and the complaint says the amount of the drug in her blood was about one fifth of the lowest level usually considered effective. Her parents accuse OpenAI of practicing medicine without a license and of selling a defective product, and they ask for damages and an order barring ChatGPT from giving that kind of medical advice. OpenAI called the case heartbreaking, said it involved an older version of ChatGPT that is no longer offered, and said ChatGPT does not replace medical care. None of the claims has yet been tested in court.