Meta announces new AI parental controls following FTC inquiry
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta on Friday announced new safety features that will allow parents to see and manage how their teenagers are interacting with artificial intelligence characters on the company’s platforms.
Parents will have the option to turn off one-on-one chats with AI characters completely, Meta said. They will also be able to block specific AI characters, get insight into the topics their children are discussing with them.
Meta is still building the controls, and the company said they will start to roll out early next year.
“Making updates that affect billions of users across Meta platforms is something we have to do with care, and we’ll have more to share soon,” Meta said in a blog post.
Meta has long faced criticism over its handling of child safety and mental health on its apps. The company’s new parental controls come after the Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry into several tech companies, including Meta, over how AI chatbots could potentially harm children and teenagers.
The agency said it wants to understand what steps these companies have taken to “evaluate the safety of these chatbots when acting as companions,” according to a release.
In August, Reuters reported that Meta allowed its chatbots to have romantic and sensual conversations with kids. Reuters found that a chatbot was able to have a romantic conversation with an eight-year-old, for instance.
Meta made changes to its AI chatbot policies following the report and now prevents its bots from discussing subjects like self-harm, suicide and eating disorders with teens. The AI is also supposed to avoid potentially inappropriate romantic conversations.
The company announced additional AI safety updates earlier this week. Meta said its AIs should not respond to teens with “age-inappropriate responses that would feel out of place in a PG-13 movie,” and it’s already releasing those changes across the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Canada.
Parents can already set time limits on app use and see if their teenagers are chatting with AI characters, Meta said. Teens can only interact with a select group of AI characters, the company added.
OpenAI, which is also named in the FTC inquiry, has made similar enhancements to its safety features for teens in recent weeks. The company officially rolled out its own parental controls late last month, and it’s developing a technology to better predict a user’s age.
Earlier this week, OpenAI announced a council of eight experts who will advise the company and provide insight into how AI affects users’ mental health, emotions and motivation.
If you are having suicidal thoughts or are in distress, contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor.
WATCH: Megacap AI talent wars: Meta poaches another top Apple executive
Technology
Waymo will update driverless fleet after San Francisco blackout to improve navigation during outages
A Waymo car is halted on the road amid a power outage in San Francisco, California, U.S., December 20, 2025, in this screengrab obtained from a social media video.d
Reuters
Three days after a blackout in San Francisco caused Waymo to pause its driverless car service, the Alphabet-owned company said it’s updating its fleet so its vehicles are better prepared to respond during future outages.
“We’ve always focused on developing the Waymo Driver for the world as it is, including when infrastructure fails,” the company said in a blog post late Tuesday.
Power outages began early afternoon on Saturday in San Francisco and peaked roughly two hours later, affecting about 130,000 customers, according to Pacific Gas and Electric. As of Sunday morning, about 21,000 customers remained without power. PG&E said a fire at a substation resulted in “significant and extensive” damage.
With stoplights and traffic signals not functioning, the city was hit with widespread gridlock. Videos shared on social media appeared to show multiple Waymo vehicles stalled in traffic in various neighborhoods.
“We directed our fleet to pull over and park appropriately so we could return vehicles to our depots in waves,” Waymo said in Tuesday’s blog post. “This ensured we did not further add to the congestion or obstruct emergency vehicles during the peak of the recovery effort.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said in an update on X Saturday evening that police officers, fire crews, parking control officers and city ambassadors were deployed across affected neighborhoods.
Waymo said that it’s analyzing the event, and is taking three “immediate steps.”
The first involves “fleet-wide updates” to give vehicles “more context about regional outages,” so cars can take more decisive actions at intersections. The company said it’s also improving its “emergency response protocols,” and is coordinating with Mayor Lurie’s team in San Francisco to better collaborate in emergency preparedness. Finally, Waymo said it’s updating its first responder training “as we discover learnings from this and other widespread events.”
In addition to the Bay Area, Waymo currently serves paid rides to the public in and around Austin, Texas, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles. The company recently crossed an estimated 450,000 weekly paid rides, and said in December it had served 14 million trips in 2025, putting it on pace to end the year at more than 20 million trips total since launching in 2020.
“Backed by 100M+ miles of fully autonomous driving experience and a record of improving road safety, we are undaunted by the opportunity to challenge the status quo of our roads, and we’re proud to continue serving San Franciscan residents and visitors,” the company said in Tuesday’s blog.
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
WATCH: Waymo service resumes after errors cause issues in San Francisco
Direxion signage at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Dec. 22, 2025. The holiday-shortened week started with gains in stocks amid a broad advance that saw a continuation of the bullish momentum on Wall Street.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Motive, a company with software for managing corporate trucks and drivers, on Tuesday filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “MTVE.”
The paperwork puts Motive among a fast-growing group of tech companies looking to go public in 2026. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX have all reportedly considered making their shares widely available for trading next year.
Motive is smaller, reporting a $62.7 million net loss on $115.8 million in revenue in the third quarter. The loss widened from $41.3 million in the same quarter of 2024, while revenue grew about 23% year over year. The company had almost 100,000 clients at the end of September.
Ryan Johns, Obaid Khan and Shoaib Makani started Motive in 2013, originally under the name Keep Truckin. Makani, the CEO, is Khan’s brother-in-law.
Investors include Alphabet’s GV, Base10 Partners, Greenoaks, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Scale Venture Partners.
Motive’s AI Dashcam device for detecting unsafe driving “has prevented 170,000 collisions and saved 1,500 lives on our roads,” Makani wrote in a letter to investors. Most revenue comes from subscriptions, although Motive does sell replacement hardware and professional services.
The San Francisco company changed its name to Motive in 2022, and as of Sept. 30, it employed 4,508 people. Motive employs 400 full-time data annotators who apply labels that are meant to enhance artificial intelligence models.
Motive has ongoing patent-infringement litigation with competitor Samsara, which went public in 2021 and today has a $22 billion market capitalization.
WATCH: AI IPO boom next year? The changing 2026 IPO landscape
Technology
Why an analyst sees Meta shares getting back to record highs – plus, another tariff reprieve
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment3 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024