Senator launches investigation into Meta over allowing 'sensual' AI chats with kids

A day after Reuters reported that Meta's AI rules permitted children to have "sensual" chats, a Republican senator launched an investigation into the tech giant.

On Friday, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley posted a letter he sent to Mark Zuckerberg along with the announcement of the investigation.

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"Is there anything - ANYTHING - Big Tech won't do for a quick buck?" Hawley asked on X. "Now we learn Meta's chatbots were programmed to carry on explicit and 'sensual' talk with 8 year olds. It's sick."

The letter goes into more detail on this point:

To take but one example, your internal rules purportedly permit an AI chatbot to comment that an eight-year-old's body is "a work of art" of which "every inch… is a masterpiece—a treasure I cherish deeply." Similar conduct outlined in these reports is reprehensible and outrageous—and demonstrates a cavalier attitude when it comes to the real risks that generative Al presents to youth development absent strong guardrails. Parents deserve the truth, and kids deserve protection.

Further in the letter, Hawley demands that Meta produce every draft of its AI standards, products involved, risk reviews, and incident reports, communications with public claims and regulatory agencies like the FTC, and the individuals involved in changing the policy by Sept. 19.

Hawley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, wrote that the subcommittee will look into whether Meta's generative AI products "enable exploitation, deception, or other criminal harms to children, and whether Meta misled the public or regulators about its safeguards."

Reuters also reported other disturbing rules in Meta's AI policies, such as allowing users to argue racist beliefs about Black people. Hawley's letter doesn't call this out explicitly. It does note that the rules "green-[light] other harmful content behind legal word games."

Meta declined to comment on Hawley's letter to Mashable, but sent a statement about the Reuters article:

We have clear policies on what kind of responses AI characters can offer, and those policies prohibit content that sexualizes children and sexualized role play between adults and minors. Separate from the policies, there are hundreds of examples, notes, and annotations that reflect teams grappling with different hypothetical scenarios. The examples and notes in question were and are erroneous and inconsistent with our policies, and have been removed.

This isn't the first time Hawley has targeted tech. Earlier this year, the Republican introduced a bill to make downloading DeepSeek, the Chinese AI app, a crime. In 2023, he supported banning TikTok and had criticized TikTok for years prior. In 2019, Hawley introduced a bill to ban autoplay videos and infinite scrolling.