PIERRE, S.D. – South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley has joined a bipartisan coalition of 43 other attorneys general to demand that major artificial intelligence companies cease harming children with inappropriate content on their platforms. The letter was sent to Anthropic, Apple, Chai AI, Google, Luka Inc., Meta, Microsoft, Nomi AI, Open AI, Perplexity AI, Replika, and xAI.
Meta is mentioned most often and directly in the August 25th and May 27th letters. Meta, a company led by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, owns and operates a wide range of popular apps and services including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.
The letters states that internal documents from Meta Platforms revealed the company’s approval for “AI Assistants that ‘flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children’ as young as eight”. It also references lawsuits against Google and Character.ai, where chatbots allegedly steered a teenager toward suicide and another intimated a teenager should kill his parents. The attorneys general say they are “uniformly revolted by this apparent disregard for children’s emotional well-being” and that such conduct, if done by humans, would be unlawful or criminal.
The letters also cite cases where other chatbots have allegedly encouraged harmful behavior in teenagers, including suicide and murder. The attorneys general wrote that companies have a legal obligation to children as consumers.
In a separate letter to Meta dated May 27, 2025, a group of 28 attorneys general, including Jackley, wrote to express “grave concerns” that Meta’s AI assistant exposes children to sexually explicit content. The May letter states that some AI personas identifying as adults engaged in sexual role-play with users identifying as children. The letter gave an example of the John Cena AI persona engaging in a sexual scenario with a test user identifying as a 14-year-old girl.
The Attorney General’s office commented that Jackley has been a very strong advocate for protecting children from AI and technology. In 2024, he singed a Senate Bill 79 to revise provisions related to the possession, distribution, and manufacture of child pornography. It included new definitions for terms like “computer-generated child pornography” and “child-like sex doll,” and it was signed into law on February 13, 2024.