Compliance Stuff

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently announced that his office is investigating some of the country’s most ubiquitous home brands — including Colgate-Palmolive, Proctor & Gamble, and General Mills — for allegedly deceptively marketing products such as toothpaste and cereal to Texas consumers, particularly children. These investigations follow the federal government’s recent growing interest in these and other products as part of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiatives launched by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On May 1, 2025, Attorney General Paxton announced that his office had sent civil investigative demands (CIDs) to Colgate-Palmolive and Proctor & Gamble for “marketing toothpaste products to parents and children in ways that are misleading, deceptive, and dangerous.” The attorney general claims that Colgate-Palmolive and Proctor & Gamble flavored their products and marketed them to “encourage kids to ingest fluoride t...

Here’s a tough one for all you compliance professionals who like to think about artificial intelligence: how would you handle an AI agent in your enterprise that, all on its own, decides to report suspected misconduct directly to regulators?  This is no longer a theoretical question; it’s a possibility embedded within Claude Opus 4, the latest AI software system developed by Anthropic, which released Claude 4 to the public last week. Anthropic also r eleased a report summarizing the testing developers performed on Claude 4  and the behavior they observed — and under certain circumstances, Claude 4 decided for itself to report suspected wrongdoing to regulators, law enforcement, and the media. To be clear, Claude 4 never actually alerted regulators to any real misconduct at real companies. This all happened in testing environments, using fake information and isolated from the real world; and the tests gave Claude 4 expanded permissions to act independently that the standard Cl...