On 19 May 2025, the Italian supervisory authority (the Garante) announced that it had levied a fine of €5m against Luka Inc., the US outfit behind a generative AI chatbot known as “Replika”, marking out the watchdog as potentially one of the most active European regulators in the AI space (having also fined OpenAI €15m in 2024). After requiring the company to suspend the operation of the chatbot in Italy in February 2023, the Garante investigated and found several breaches of data protection laws, prompting it not just to issue a fine, but also to:

a)  require Luka to bring the chatbot into compliance; and
b) announce a further investigation into whether Luka’s training of the large language model (LLM) sitting behind the Replika chatbot complies with data protection legislation.