Meta faces expensive child safety reckoning

Also: Google executives jump ship in race for AI dominance Hello, TechScape readers! Danielle Abril, editor of the Guardian’s Reworked series on AI and the future of work, filling in for Blake Montgomery this week. Major legal battles against Meta over child safety are playing out in courts across the US – and the tech giant is losing. Recent rulings raise big questions about social media companies’ responsibility to their youngest users. Meanwhile, more key executives have jumped ship from Google as it battles OpenAI and Anthropic in the race for AI dominance, and Meta’s smartglasses face a fearsome backlash. Let’s dig in! The pressure on social media giants including Meta is mounting, as courts work through a growing pile of cases and deliver devastating, expensive rulings, one after another. Meta’s repeated losses underscore how serious the child safety crisis has become for social media companies and may force them to change how they operate to avoid further costly legal exposure. The latest blow came last week, after a New Mexico court hit Meta with an order to pay $567m into a teen mental health fund to remediate the harm its platforms have caused children. The penalty adds t