Sponsors (4)
Official title: Require the creation of family accounts for children to be able to use artificial intelligence chatbots, to require verifiable parental consent for teens using artificial intelligence chatbots, and for other purposes.
Introduced April 28, 2026 by Rafael Edward Cruz · Last progress April 28, 2026
The bill significantly strengthens privacy, transparency, parental control, and enforcement to protect children from risky AI chatbot practices, but does so at the cost of substantial compliance complexity and expense for platforms and governments, potential reductions in functionality or teen autonomy, and some short‑term uncertainty while enforcement and evidence structures are implemented.
Parents and families — and thus children and teens — gain stronger, enforceable privacy and data‑control protections (deletion, retention limits, portability, parental consent/verification rules) that limit how minors' data is collected, stored, and used.
Parents and families get clearer transparency and oversight (persistent AI labels, disclosures, access to conversations, reporting/appeal channels) making it easier to know when chat content is AI‑generated and to escalate harms.
Minors will receive far less personalized behavioral advertising and profiling, reducing exploitative targeting of children and teens while still allowing limited age‑appropriate ads.
Covered platforms, developers, schools, and related service providers face substantial new compliance and operational costs to implement parental controls, data deletion/portability, labels, verification, and reporting systems.
Conservative defaults, limits on data retention/uses, and reduced ad targeting could degrade functionality, personalization, and the economics that support free or richly featured services, affecting user experience and content investment.
Investigations, enforcement, and compliance will be more complex and time‑consuming (reasonable‑prudent‑person/totality standards, GAO reporting, state–federal coordination), increasing burdens on regulators and possibly delaying remedies.
Based on analysis of 12 sections of legislative text.
Imposes parental-consent, family-account, transparency, parental-control, data-retention/deletion, and targeted-ad restrictions for AI chatbots used by children and teens, with FTC enforcement and mandated NSF/GAO studies.
Requires companies that operate open-ended AI chatbots to use family accounts for users under 18, obtain verifiable parental consent for teens, provide granular parental controls, display persistent transparency labels, ban targeted ads using children’s or teens’ personal data, and delete personal data when accounts are terminated. It gives the Federal Trade Commission enforcement authority, requires an NSF study on how chatbots affect children and teens, and requires a GAO evaluation of the law and parental-control best practices. The law takes effect one year after enactment.