Roblox, which is being sued by 2 US states for endangering children, earns praise from the US Attorney General Alliance for 'promoting safe, more positive digital experiences'

The Attorney General Alliance, a bipartisan group of US state attorneys general that "takes on emerging issues like cannabis regulation, sports betting," has launched a new Partnership for Youth Online Safety initiative, and its first game industry partner is none other than Roblox. The AGA praised Roblox "for its leadership in promoting safe, more positive digital experiences for all through better product design," and if you think that sounds a little odd, it's possibly because Roblox is being sued by two associate members of AGA, Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill and Kentucky attorney general Russell Coleman.

The Partnership for Youth Online Safety project "aims to reduce online harms through the development of practical, collaborative, and measurable design-based safeguards while also sharing best practices and tools that public and private partners can use to collaborate more effectively and better protect children online."

That includes establishing "standards and best practices" for safe product design, improving systems for deterring online child exploitation, grooming, and harassment, establishing standards for sharing data between private companies and law enforcement, improving parental awareness and education, and building "sustained, trust-based partnerships between government, industry, and advocacy groups to accelerate solutions to emerging threats."

The inaugural partners for the initiative are the Center for Humane Technology, a non-profit org dedicated to ensuring that tech serves humanity, and, as mentioned, Roblox, one of the most popular videogame platforms on the planet, especially among young gamers.

"This partnership with the Attorney General Alliance is a landmark step in our ongoing commitment to online child safety," Roblox CEO David Baszucki said. "By combining our decades of experience in online child safety with the authority of the Attorneys General, we can move quickly to co-design and deploy the next generation of protective tools and frameworks. This collaboration will help set new safety standards across the digital ecosystem used by kids and teens.

"At Roblox, we are constantly innovating and investing in safeguards, including AI and human moderation, real-time chat filtering and proactive content scanning, to create a positive and secure environment for the millions of people who create and play on our platform every day."

The AGA partnership stands in rather sharp contrast to the lawsuits filed by Louisiana in August and Kentucky in October, and most recently the launch of a criminal investigation by the state of Florida. Those have produced some rather spicier attorneys general quotes: Liz Murrill of Louisiana, for instance, said "it's basically open season for sex predators" on Roblox, while Kentucky's Russell Coleman called Roblox "a hunting ground for child predators" and accused it of wilfully refusing to implement "basic safety measures."

Murrill, reacting to the announcement on X, didn't seem especially impressed, but she did notably ease up on the inflammatory language: "Hey Roblox—Let’s have more meaningful protections for children. Not just lobbying."

The AGA doesn't dictate policy—it is, as far as I can tell, more of a working forum where state AGs can share ideas, discuss complex (or maybe not so complex) matters, and get together now and then for drinks and expensive meals. So Roblox partnering up with it for this program isn't going to directly derail any lawsuits, but it could complicate them somewhat—it's a lot harder to accuse a platform of being a haven for sex predators when your professional working group is holding it up as an exemplar of online protections—and might help head off other potential state-filed lawsuits in the future.