SAN FRANCISCO —- California Attorney General Rob Bonta is building an artificial intelligence accountability program as his office probes Elon Musk’s xAI over the generation of non-consensual sexually explicit images, he told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

The California Attorney General’s office moved quickly last month to send a cease-and-desist letter to xAI, as regulators globally investigated the company over sexualized content that its AI chatbot Grok produced of adults and potentially minors, Mr. Bonta said.

Mr. Bonta said his office is seeking confirmation that the conduct has stopped and remains in discussions with the company. He said xAI deflected responsibility and still permits some sexualized content generation for paying subscribers.

“Just because you stop going forward doesn’t mean you get a pass on what you did,” Mr. Bonta added.

XAI, recently acquired by Mr. Musk’s SpaceX, did not respond to a request for comment.

In January, the company said it had added measures to reject user requests for sexualized images of real people, for instance editing them to be in a bikini. XAI has also said it blocks users from generating such images in jurisdictions where that is illegal.

California’s enforcement shows the Democratic stronghold is embracing its role as an AI watchdog, despite ongoing pushes by industry and some Republican lawmakers for it to defer to federal authorities on law and regulation. Mr. Bonta warned against granting Congress exclusive regulatory authority given its prior gridlock on data protection and AI.

The California Attorney General’s office is “beefing up” its in-house expertise through its “AI oversight, accountability and regulation program,” Mr. Bonta said. AI chatbots that have sexually explicit conversations with youth or tell them how to commit suicide are unacceptable, he said.

State authorities have also told San Francisco-based OpenAI that California has an “ongoing interest” in its efforts to keep its products and services safe, after Mr. Bonta’s office helped oversee its corporate restructuring last year, he said.

The state’s legislature is considering a bill that would require the attorney general’s office to establish a program to build expertise in AI.

Speaking in a joint interview with Reuters, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called AI and social media harm “the consumer protection fight of our time,” shaping up to be a bigger battle than over opioids. “This affects all of our children,” he said.  — Reuters

PERU’S Congress on Tuesday ousted President Jose Jeri just four months into his term over a scandal involving undisclosed meetings with a Chinese businessman, extending a cycle of political upheaval that has gripped the Andean nation for much of the past decade.

There were 75 lawmakers who voted in favor of removing Mr. Jeri, while 24 voted against and three abstained.

Legislators will now elect a new head of Congress who will also assume Peru’s presidency, becoming the country’s eighth president in as many years. Mr. Jeri is Peru’s third consecutive president to be removed from office.

The rapid-fire ousters underscore how Peru’s political class has failed to address voter concerns like crime and corruption, leaving the country stuck in a cycle of short-lived administrations with little time or authority to tackle problems and a deeply unpopular Congress that seeks to gain support by removing unpopular leaders.

Ruth Luque, one of the lawmakers who backed the censure measures, said she wanted to replace Mr. Jeri with a leader who would put public interest and security first, ahead of a new president coming into office.

“We ask to end this agony so we can truly create the transition citizens are hoping for,” she said. “Not a transition with hidden interests, influence-peddling, secret meetings and hooded figures. We don’t want that sort of transition.”

With yet another interim leader set to take over ahead of scheduled elections on April 12, the volatility risks deepening public distrust as legislators and politicians seek to posture themselves as presidential contenders.

“It strikes me that there is no trace of high mindedness here, only electoral calculations,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington. “Enough lawmakers concluded their support for Jeri would hurt them in elections, so they had to act.”

The scandal that was dubbed “Chifagate” – after a local name for Chinese restaurants – began last month when Mr. Jeri was filmed arriving at a restaurant late at night wearing a hood to meet with Chinese businessman Zhihua Yang, who owns stores and a concession for an energy project. The meeting was not publicly disclosed.

Mr. Jeri became president in October after Peru’s unpopular Congress voted unanimously to remove his predecessor Dina Boluarte, as the right-wing parties that had backed her dropped their support amid corruption scandals and growing anger over rising crime.

Ms. Boluarte had no vice president and Mr. Jeri, who was the head of Congress at the time, was next in the line of succession.

This interim status was used to remove him from the presidency on Tuesday. Unlike impeachment, which requires a supermajority of 87 in the 130-member legislature, Congress voted to censure Mr. Jeri, which strips him of his title as head of Congress with a simple majority.

Mr. Jeri has said he would respect the outcome of the vote.

VOTING ON NEW PRESIDENT ON WEDNESDAY
While the current head of Congress, Fernando Rospigliosi, would be constitutionally next in the line of succession, he has declined to assume the presidency. As such, legislators will have to elect a new head of Congress who will then automatically assume the presidency.

Mr. Rospigliosi said parties have until 6 p.m. local time to present their candidates and the legislature would vote on a new president on Wednesday.

This would be similar to Francisco Sagasti’s ascent to the presidency in 2020 after he was chosen by Congress amid a sharp political crisis and protests following former President Manuel Merino’s five-day presidency.

The field for the April election is crowded, with dozens of candidates expected to participate. According to a recent Ipsos poll, large portions of the electorate are undecided about who to vote for.

Despite the political turmoil, Peru’s mining-heavy economy has remained resilient with 3.4% growth in 2025 and relatively low inflation of 1.7%, underscoring how the economy has remained insulated from political shocks. — Reuters

Millions of files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein suggest the existence of a “global criminal enterprise” that carried out acts meeting the legal threshold of crimes against humanity, according to a panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The experts said crimes outlined in documents released by the US Justice Department were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption, and extreme misogyny.

The crimes, they said, showed a commodification and dehumanization of women and girls.

“So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity,” the experts said in a statement.

The experts said the allegations contained in the files require an independent, thorough and impartial investigation, and said inquiries should also be launched into how it was possible for such crimes to be committed for so long.

The US Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A law, approved by Congress with broad bipartisan support in November, requires all Epstein-related files to be made public.

The UN experts raised concerns about “serious compliance failures and botched redactions” that exposed sensitive victim information. More than 1,200 victims were identified in the documents that have been released so far.

“The reluctance to fully disclose information or broaden investigations, has left many survivors feeling retraumatized and subjected to what they describe as ‘institutional gaslighting,'” the experts said.

The Justice Department’s release of documents has revealed Mr. Epstein’s ties to many prominent people in politics, finance, academia, and business – both before and after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to prostitution charges, including soliciting an underage girl.

He was found hanged in his jail cell in 2019 after being arrested again on federal charges of sex trafficking of minors. His death was ruled a suicide. —  Reuters