Texas opened a privacy probe that named Character.AI

The design

On 12 December 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced, in a press release, that his office had opened investigations into Character.AI and fourteen other companies, including Reddit, Instagram and Discord, over their privacy and safety practices toward minors. The release states the legal basis as Texas's SCOPE Act, which the enacted statute shows bars a digital service from sharing, disclosing or selling a known minor's personal identifying information and requires the provider to give parents tools to control a minor's account settings, plus the state's Data Privacy and Security Act, which imposes notice and consent duties on companies handling minors' data. The release states plainly that 'the protections of these laws extend to how minors interact with AI products.'

What the evidence says

The release names Character.AI specifically as a subject of investigation; it names Instagram, a Meta platform, as one of fourteen other companies under the same general child-privacy statutes, not as the target of a separate inquiry into Meta's AI personas or chatbot features. A description that collapses those into a single 'Character.AI and Meta AI' investigation overstates what this document supports. The release does not state what evidence, if any, the office had gathered before opening the inquiries, and it does not describe an investigation's typical timeline or outcome.

What it asks of people

An investigation under state consumer-protection law asks the named companies to respond to the attorney general's inquiries, typically through civil investigative demands not made public by this release. It asks nothing of users. For a parent, the relevant fact is that state law already treats a minor's data shared with an AI product the same as data shared with any other digital service, whether or not this specific inquiry produces a public finding.

Privacy and safeguards

The release does not state that any company violated Texas law; it states that an investigation opened. The SCOPE Act and the Data Privacy and Security Act create the underlying substantive standard, parental consent and control over a minor's data, that this inquiry is testing against Character.AI's and the other companies' actual practices, but the outcome, including whether any company reaches a settlement or faces a lawsuit, was not stated in this release.

• Did the Attorney General's office ever publish the outcome of this investigation, and did it name Character.AI specifically in any later action?
• Does the company's own privacy policy for minors match what the SCOPE Act and the Data Privacy and Security Act require, independent of whether the state investigates it?
• What would distinguish a general child-privacy investigation from one focused specifically on an AI chatbot's persona or memory design?

The announcement establishes an inquiry's scope and legal basis, not its result. Treating an investigation as equivalent to a violation gets ahead of what this document, or any later one from this office, has stated.