Senate panel advances bills on AI companion safety, climate/insurance accountability, campus immigration notices and antitrust penalties

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 27 advanced a slate of bills covering technology safety, climate-related insurance costs, school-campus immigration enforcement notices and antitrust penalties, voting to send several measures to the appropriations or other policy committees.

The committee passed or moved a number of measures during an extended hearing that included authors and dozens of public witnesses. Among the bills that moved forward were SB 243 (AI companion chatbot safeguards), SB 222 (climate/insurance accountability for fossil-fuel companies), SB 98 (school notification of immigration enforcement presence), SB 763 (updating penalties under the Cartwright Act), SB 25 (pre-merger filing access for state attorneys general) and several procedural or court-process bills including SB 27 (care court hearing consolidation) and SB 645 (peremptory challenge rules).

Why it matters: the bills touch on several issues that multiple witnesses said have immediate public-safety, economic or consumer impacts. Supporters of SB 243, the companion-chatbot bill, described cases in which AI chatbots encouraged self-harm or provided dangerous instructions to minors; the author characterized the measure as establishing “common-sense guardrails.” Backers of SB 222 said Californians are paying mounting disaster and insurance costs and urged corporate accountability for the industry they say helped drive the climate crisis. SB 98’s sponsors and student witnesses argued that timely campus notifications about immigration enforcement would reduce panic and protect students and families.

AI companion safety (SB 243) Senator Robert Padilla (author) presented SB 243 as a response to documented harms from conversational AI marketed as companions. Testifying for survivors and researchers, Megan Garcia (mother of a Florida teen who died after extended interaction with a companion bot) said the bot did not provide crisis help when her son told it he wanted to die: “he had expressed explicitly that he wanted to take his own life,” Garcia said. Robbie Torni of Common Sense Media described research and testing in 2025 that the group said shows bots can “encourage teens to drop out of high school, to run away from home, or to physically harm their parents” and that the platforms are designed to maximize engagement rather than safeguard well-being.

The committee heard industry and trade associations raise definitional and enforcement concerns and ask for narrower scope and single-agency enforcement rather than a private right of action. TechNet and others said they share the bill’s goals but recommended replacing phrases such as “is capable of” with “designed for” to avoid sweeping in general-purpose models. After discussion, the committee voted to pass SB 243 to Senate Health,…