Tech
New Mexico just handed Meta its first courtroom defeat over child safety, and the rest of the country is watching
A jury in Santa Fe on Tuesday ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties after finding the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangered children.
New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez’s office called the decision a “watershed moment for every parent concerned about what could happen to their kids when they go online,” according to a press release issued right after the ruling.
The verdict, reached after a six-week trial, found Meta liable on both claims brought by the state under its Unfair Practices Act. At $5,000 per violation — the maximum allowed under the law — the penalty may seem paltry for a company valued at $1.5 trillion by public market investors. But the dollar amount isn’t as important as the fact that this is the first jury verdict of its kind against Meta over harm to young people.
“Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew,” Torrez said in a statement following the verdict. “Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”
New Mexico’s case against the company grew out of a 2023 undercover investigation in which state investigators created decoy accounts on Facebook and Instagram posing as users younger than 14. Those accounts were sent sexually explicit material and solicited for sex by several New Mexico men who were arrested in May 2024. Two were apprehended at a motel where they believed they’d be meeting a 12-year-old girl, based on conversations they had with the accounts.
The operation formed the basis of the state’s case. The evidence it produced — along with internal Meta documents and testimony from former employees — showed that company staff and outside child safety experts repeatedly raised alarms about dangers on the platforms and were largely ignored.
Some of the most damaging testimony came from people who worked inside the company.
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Arturo Béjar, who spent six years as an engineering and product leader at Meta beginning in 2009, told the court (after testifying before the Senate years earlier) about his efforts to warn Meta executives after his own 14-year-old daughter received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram. He also testified that the same personalized algorithms that make Meta’s platforms effective at targeting ads could be equally useful to predators.
“The product is very good at connecting people with interests,” Béjar said, “and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls.”
Brian Boland, a former vice president of partnerships product marketing at Meta who spent nearly a dozen years with the company, testified that when he left the outfit in 2020, he “absolutely did not believe that safety was a priority” to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Zuckerberg was deposed as part of the case, and a recording of that deposition, which was taken a year ago but shown to jurors earlier this month, offered some of the trial’s more memorable moments. Zuckerberg described research on whether the platforms are addictive as “inconclusive,” a characterization that the state pushed back on, noting Meta’s own researchers found that several product features were designed to produce dopamine responses and increase time spent on the apps.
When asked whether he, as a parent, had a right to know if a product his own child was using was addictive, Zuckerberg said there was a lot to “unpack in that.” He then noted that he and his wife personally look into whether products are “good to use” before giving them to their children, and that they “also oversee how they’re used.” His children, he noted, are “younger.”
Unsurprisingly, Meta said it plans to appeal. “We respectfully disagree with the verdict,” a spokesperson said to media outlets, adding that the company “works hard to keep people safe” on its platforms.
The New Mexico case is far from Meta’s only legal headache. Meta and YouTube are also embroiled in a trial in Los Angeles over claims that their platforms are addictive and have harmed young users.
That second verdict could come soon. A jury is deliberating in the case, which was brought by a plaintiff known only as K.G.M., a 20-year-old California woman who claims she became addicted to social media as a child and that she suffered anxiety, depression, and body-image issues as a result. (TikTok and Snap were also defendants and settled before trial.)
On Monday, the judge overseeing the Los Angeles case told jurors to keep deliberating after the panel indicated it was having trouble reaching a verdict on one of the defendants — raising the possibility of at least a partial retrial.
Meanwhile, a second phase of the New Mexico case — a bench trial (meaning there is no jury) on public nuisance claims scheduled to begin May 4 — could result in more penalties, along with court-mandated changes to Meta’s platforms, including age verification requirements and new protections for minors.
Rather than arguing that Meta broke a specific consumer protection law, the state is arguing that the company’s platforms have broadly harmed the health and safety of New Mexico residents.
Tech
Glean’s top line crosses $300M as AI budget cutting becomes its major selling point
Glean, a company often described as the Google for enterprise, said it has reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a three-fold increase from the $100 million milestone it reached just 15 months ago.
While many AI startups are growing at a blistering pace, Glean’s progress is particularly remarkable. After years of essentially being the only player in the category, the seven-year-old startup is accelerating its growth as tech giants enter the enterprise AI search market with rival products.
“The first four or five years of our existence, we had no competition,” Glean CEO Arvind Jain told TechCrunch. “Given how important search is to make AI work in the enterprise, every single company in the world wants to be in this space.”
Tech heavyweights building Glean-like tools include Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Atlassian.
Jain maintains there’s value in being a first mover in the space, but that it’s also equally important to offer a better product.
What Glean does better than its competition, according to Jain, comes down to the deep understanding that its AI tools have of customers’ business needs. Glean’s AI achieves this knowledge — a concept captured by the new, popular term “context graph” — by connecting to and learning from enterprises’ internal software systems.
Jain claims that Glean’s context graph also helps enterprises cut AI computing costs.
“If you connect your AI to Glean, it gives you all the information that you need to do your work, and that results in AI consuming far fewer tokens compared to if you unleash AI onto your systems directly,” Jain said. That’s because with Glean, AI ends up performing fewer operations, he added.
At a time when many companies are blowing through their AI budgets, those token cost savings have become a major selling point for the company.
“One of the things you know our customers really like about Glean is the fact that we can reduce your AI bill significantly,” he said.
The company, which was last valued at $7.2 billion when it raised a $150 million Series F last June, offers various pricing structures to its customers, which include Databricks, Reddit, Pinterest, and Samsung.
According to Jain, Glean offers both a consumption-based model, where clients pay per use, and a hybrid model that combines a fixed monthly fee for active users with separate usage fees for model consumption.
Glean is definitely not the first company to do this, but it’s worth pointing out that the company’s $300 million milestone cannot be fully described as traditional ARR, because a consumption model by definition doesn’t have a strictly recurring component.
Pure consumption pricing models depend on fluctuating user activity rather than predictable subscription renewals, therefore a portion of Glean’s top line is more accurately described as an annualized revenue run rate.
Glean did not immediately respond to a request for comment; this post will be updated if the company replies.
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Tech
Final 24 hours to save up to $410 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ticket
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Today is the last day to apply to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 returns October 13–15 to Moscone West in San Francisco — and applications to speak are open for just a few more hours.
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More than 10,000 startup and VC leaders will gather at Disrupt 2026 to explore what’s next in AI, scaling, fintech, infrastructure, robotics, and the future of innovation.
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