“They keep on making announcements but the children in their homes, in their schools, in their lives, are no safer.”
Baroness Kidron

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When I see photos of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy from the US, I think of my own son. A picture of glowing youth and naive silliness. Ready for life.

But Sewell fell into a coercive relationship with a chatbot that ultimately encouraged him to kill himself two years ago.

I know that I need to let my kids use technology, but I’m worried about how some of the most addictive apps and platforms might damage them. One kid versus a multi-billion dollar industry doesn’t seem like a fair fight.

A couple of weeks ago, Sewell’s mum, Megan Garcia, and her husband came to London to tell their son’s tragic story to MPs and members of the House of Lords. She recently settled a lawsuit against Character.AI, the app her son was using, for failing to keep her son safe on its platform.

But we can’t depend on righteous, grieving mothers – powerful though they are – to enforce consequences on these tech companies.

Luckily, there’s a reason to be positive, and it’s one where the Bureau’s reporting played a role. On Wednesday, the House of Lords passed an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that would make it a criminal offence for tech companies to fail to keep chatbots safe for kids – and it would hold company directors responsible.

This radically shifts the onus onto the tech companies, which are raking in a fortune from these products. The government has now said that it will bring in further regulations.

The amendment was introduced by Baroness Kidron, a longtime digital rights activist who now sits as a crossbench peer. When we interviewed her before the vote, she told us she thought “that this government’s legacy will be that they got the AI issue wrong”. Hopefully, with her amendment passed, it can correct its course.

Kidron credited our reporting for bringing attention to these issues. Last year our investigation into Character.AI, the same platform Sewell used, found that some of its “companions” were modelled on gang leaders, school shooters and paedophiles. Character.AI has since taken measures to ban under-18s – although plenty of similar platforms remain available to children.

We don’t stop at reporting – we make sure policymakers and parliamentarians are listening to us when it comes to shaping the way forward.

Effie Webb, who led that investigation, was also in Parliament this week as part of a House of Lords conversation on misogyny, AI and women’s health. She was able to feed some of her reporting into the discussion on bias in healthcare AI and the policy changes needed to prevent harm to women and marginalised groups as these systems are rolled out across the NHS. She’ll be back there again next week to talk about AI chatbots and violence against women and girls.

I’m pro using as many innovative tech tools as possible, but the widespread disregard for safety is staggering. As Kidron said in parliament: “We have a new technology—it addicts, grooms, abuses and sometimes even kills. This is not in the future; it is right now.” So the sooner we can make it a fair fight, the better.

My kids will have to grapple with this their whole lives – but there are ways to resist the overwhelming power of the tech industry. Kidron has made me believe it’s possible and showed me how it can happen.

Later this month, we’ll be hosting the latest edition of TBIJ Live, this time to break down our blockbuster investigation into illegal children’s homes.

An increasing number of vulnerable young people across the country are being placed in children’s homes that are not registered with Ofsted. It means they are not subject to routine inspections, so there are no guarantees of quality or safety. Unsurprisingly, it’s also against the law. And yet in 2024 alone, nearly 800 children were placed in this type of illegal accommodation. They stayed there for an average of six months each.

Councils say unregistered homes are only ever used as a last resort, when no lawful accommodation is available. But evidence from the children’s commissioner for England shows that these placements are not always a stopgap.

Join us on Wednesday 25 March on Zoom to hear from Bureau Local editor Gareth Davies and reporter Tom Wall and find out more about how we unearthed this story. Tickets are free, so don’t miss out:

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

Keir Starmer’s director of communications, Tim Allan, founded a PR firm that once got busted for paid-for Wikipedia edits: a practice that goes against the British PR professionals’ code of conduct.

The clients who benefitted from this “wikilaundering” service are some of the world’s richest and most powerful people. But after the firm was exposed, former employees told us, it simply started hiring middlemen instead.

Portland’s subcontractors have previously polished the public image of Qatar by burying references to critical reporting ahead of the 2022 World Cup and scrubbed evidence that a billion-dollar Gates Foundation-funded project had failed in its mission.

Read more here. 

More than two years ago, we revealed tens of millions of pounds in secretive payments had been made from offshore firms owned by Roman Abramovich during his time as owner of Chelsea.

Some of the secret payments related to buying major stars, including Eden Hazard, Samuel Eto’o and Willian. The investigation raised big questions about financial fair play rules – and the 17 major trophies Chelsea won under the oligarch’s ownership.

Before the UK government decided Abramovich was a Putin ally and a danger to Ukraine and the West, it was only too happy for him to pump tonnes of cash into the football industry. And so Abramovich fueled massive success for Chelsea, while other clubs struggled to keep up and floundered.

Now, following its own lengthy investigation, the English Premier League has handed Chelsea the biggest fine in the competition’s history. In fact, they found even more payments, which it says total over £45m.

I’m personally not convinced the fine will do much to put clubs off this kind of behaviour. This wrongdoing went on for years, but the fine is only £10.75m, less than 2 per cent of Chelsea’s 2025 revenue.

You can make your own mind up on whether that’s a fair punishment. But I’m glad our reporting led to the truth.

If you want to keep supporting independent journalism that holds oligarchs to account, you can become a Bureau Insider for the price of a coffee per month. It’s your support that will lead to the next big investigation.

Just a week after we reported that Peru’s government had to trash 118,000 vials of poor-quality imported chemo drugs since 2019, the Ministry of Health announced new inspections.

Its drugs regulator will visit 26 drug factories abroad, inspect them and ensure the facilities hold the right certifications.

Did I mention you could support this kind of change-making journalism? Go on, you know you want to.