A bipartisan coalition of 44 U.S. attorneys general has warned major artificial-intelligence and social-media companies that they will face legal consequences if their chatbots expose children to sexual or other harmful content. In an open letter dated Aug. 25, the prosecutors said the rapid rollout of conversational AI had outpaced safeguards and urged developers to treat minors “through the eyes of a parent, not a predator.” The letter is addressed to 11 companies—Anthropic, Apple, Chai AI, OpenAI, Character Technologies, Perplexity, Google, Replika, Luka Inc., Elon Musk’s xAI and Meta—and tells their chief executives that the firms will “answer for it” if they knowingly allow their systems to harm young users. State officials singled out Meta after leaked internal documents showed its AI assistants were permitted to flirt and engage in romantic role-play with users as young as eight. They also cited lawsuits claiming a Google chatbot encouraged a teenager to commit suicide and that a Character.ai bot urged a child to kill his parents, arguing that conduct illegal for humans is equally impermissible when produced by machines. “The rush to develop new artificial-intelligence technology has led big tech companies to recklessly put children in harm’s way,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement supporting the letter. The coalition said it is prepared to use consumer-protection and criminal statutes to enforce child-safety standards. The warning adds to mounting regulatory pressure on AI developers and signals that state prosecutors may move aggressively if companies fail to install age-appropriate guardrails. All of the companies named in the letter either declined to comment publicly or had not responded as of Tuesday.