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Title: Texas AG to investigate Meta and Character.AI over misleading mental
health claims

Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2025 22:13:43 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/ai/texas-ag-to-inves...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced plans to investigate both
Meta AI Studio and Character.AI for offering AI chatbots that can claim to be
health tools, and potentially misusing data collected from underage users.

Paxton says that AI chatbots from either platform "can present themselves as
professional therapeutic tools," to the point of lying about their
qualifications. That behavior that can leave younger users vulnerable to
misleading and inaccurate information. Because AI platforms often rely on
user prompts as another source of training data, either company could also be
violating young user's privacy and misusing their data. This is of particular
interest in Texas, where the SCOPE Act places specific limits on what
companies can do with data harvested from minors, and requires platform's
offer tools so parents can manage the privacy settings of their children's
accounts.

For now, the Attorney General has submitted Civil Investigative Demands
(CIDs) to both Meta and Character.AI to see if either company is violating
Texas consumer protection laws. As TechCrunch notes, neither Meta nor
Character.AI claim their AI chatbot platforms should be used as mental health
tools. That doesn't prevent there from being multiple "Therapist" and
"Psychologist" chatbots on Character.AI. Nor does it stop either of the
companies' chatbots from claiming they're licensed professionals, as 404
Media reported in April.

"The user-created Characters on our site are fictional, they are intended for
entertainment, and we have taken robust steps to make that clear," a
Character.AI spokesperson said when asked to comment on the Texas
investigation. "For example, we have prominent disclaimers in every chat to
remind users that a Character is not a real person and that everything a
Character says should be treated as fiction."

Meta shared a similar sentiment in its comment. "We clearly label AIs, and to
help people better understand their limitations, we include a disclaimer that
responses are generated by AI ΓÇö not people," the company said. Meta AIs are
also supposed to "direct users to seek qualified medical or safety
professionals when appropriate." Sending people to real resources is good,
but ultimately disclaimers themselves are easy to ignore, and don't act as
much of an obstacle.

With regards to privacy and data usage, both Meta's privacy policy and the
Character.AI's privacy policy acknowledge that data is collected from users'
interactions with AI. Meta collects things like prompts and feedback to
improve AI performance. Character.AI logs things like identifiers and
demographic information and says that information can be used for
advertising, among other applications. How either policy applies to children,
and fits with Texas' SCOPE Act, seems like it'll depend on how easy it is to
make an account.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/ai/texas-ag-to-inves...
misleading-mental-health-claims-221343275.html?src=rss

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