New California education laws address AI, staffing, student supports and more – OCDE Newsroom

California has passed SB 1119, also known as Adam's Law, handing AI companion chatbot makers a five-item compliance list: safety notifications, parental controls, crisis protocols, risk assessments and independent audits. Only one of those involves anyone from outside the building, and in this sector an independent audit usually means a firm you hired confirming that you are lovely. Statutes of this shape tend to carry a first name rather than a section number, and nobody names a bill after a spreadsheet. Adam's Law it is.

The student data provision — the one barring edtech companies from training generative AI on covered student information — does not begin until 2027. Not next term, not this budget cycle, not before the next thing: 2027. Which leaves a comfortable stretch in which the records of California schoolchildren remain, as far as this statute is concerned, fair game for the next frontier model, pending whatever the vendors volunteer in the interim. 'Beginning in 2027' is a deadline written by people who have watched how deadlines behave.

The headline also promises the package handles staffing, student supports 'and more' — the legislative equivalent of a takeaway menu's last three items, listed so that no one has to describe them. What is legible is a state deciding the companion app needs a chaperone at the school gate: someone must be notified, someone must be audited, and a parent must eventually be told that their child's chatbot had a crisis protocol to run. It is not nothing. It is precisely the something that gets done in one session, and the something that will get done in this one. Whether a fourteen-year-old should be spending her evenings being told she is loved by a product with a quarterly revenue target remains, since nobody asked, outside the paperwork.