The focus on AI safety disasters ignores everyday harms

Consider what passes for success in technology policy. An AI company promises that its chatbot will not encourage suicide . A social media platform makes it more difficult for children to buy fentanyl . These are important protections, and they should have existed all along. But companies can clear these low bars while continuing to make products that leave young people dependent on simulated friendships or trapped in feeds built to keep them scrolling.

We have historically allowed the debate over technology to be defined by the worst thing a product might do, with remarkably little discussion of the insidious damage it does every day. As we transition into an era defined by powerful AI products, we should demand that the tech industry do more than merely address catastrophic harms. We should take measures to ensure that its products don’t erode how we think, learn, and interact with one another.

A teenager who develops an unhealthy attachment to an AI companion may never appear in a lawsuit or a newspaper, except in the most egregious cases. Neither will the student who begins relying on a chatbot to write every paper, or the young person who measures their life against a social media feed engineered to provoke envy and keep them watching. A product can meet every narrow safety requirement and still leave our entire culture worse off in ways that don’t always make headlines.

A narrow definition of success defined around safety is politically convenient for the technology industry, and companies actively promote such definitions. Taking steps to prevent spectacular disasters is good for business: It can mean fewer lawsuits and less pressure for serious regulation. Confronting the everyday consequences of dependence would require something considerably more threatening to their bottom line. It might mean asking companies to add more friction to their products or actively limit engagement or features that lead to negative outcomes, such as addictive attention-hacking algorithms.

Technology giants have instead worked to shape legislation around the harms they are already under direct pressure to address. This year, for example, Google backed bills to regulate AI chatbots in several states . The legislation mandated basic protections against sexual content and promotion of self-harm that tech companies should have established regardless, but with broad carve-outs that could exempt some of the most popular services. Passing these bills allowed legislators to claim a safety win while efforts to promote stronger legislation—laws designed to prevent children from becoming emotionally dependent on AI—failed. This playbook worked in states like Nebraska, producing legislation heavily influenced by industry at the expense of bills that would have done more to hold companies accountable.

We have been through a version of this with social media. Globally, people who use the internet now spend an average of more than two hours a day on social media platforms—time that has been quietly taken from ordinary life and handed over to companies whose profits depend on keeping us there. No one, outside perhaps a few tech CEOs, wanted these algorithms to occupy such a large portion of our waking hours, and their cultural engineering can actually contribute to violence on a devastating scale. Meta’s platforms have been cited for contributing to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar , anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka , and alleged calls for violence during Ethiopia’s Tigray war . The same incentives operate in the feeds that shape young Americans’ understanding of politics, their peers, and the wider world.

AI is extending this logic into parts of life that social media could influence only from a distance. It offers to write our thoughts for us and stand in for the people we might otherwise turn to. A third of teens now choose to discuss serious matters with AI companions instead of other people. MIT researchers found that young people using ChatGPT to write essays showed weaker brain connectivity during the task, and their evidence indicated that “cognitive debt” persisted even after the task was complete. There is plenty we still need to learn about the long-term effects. We already have reason to ask whether technology marketed as making us more capable is eroding the habits and relationships that help us develop capabilities in the first place.

Follow this way of thinking to its logical endpoint and you get a world of perfectly sanitized entertainment, with chatbots ready to spare us the difficulty of thinking or of dealing with another person’s feelings (or even our own). But anyone who has struggled to write something worth reading, or repair a damaged friendship, knows how much gets lost in that bargain. We build judgment through effort and friction, and we learn to live with other people by confronting the fact that they have needs and opinions of their own.

We should demand safety as a minimum, yes—and then demand considerably more. Technology companies and school districts should have to show beyond a reasonable doubt that AI improves learning and critical thinking before making it a fixture in classrooms. Companies should be prohibited from designing companions that pretend to be conscious or profess love to users, and they should face independent scrutiny of how their systems affect relationships and people’s ability to think for themselves. The companies that have inserted their products into nearly every part of modern life have earned obligations far greater than avoiding the next terrible headline.

Sam Hiner is the cofounder and executive director of the Young People’s Alliance, where he coordinated a coalition of advocates to pass laws regulating AI companions in eight states in 2026—laws such as California’s SB1119. Sam graduated from the University of North Carolina atChapel Hill in 2025 and was named to the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Impact list.

Emma Leiken is executive director of…

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