Sponsor
Mariannette Miller-Meeks
Representative · R-IA
Representative · R-IA
Official title: To establish requirements and guidelines for conversational AI services, and for other purposes.
Introduced July 16, 2026 by Mariannette Miller-Meeks · Last progress July 16, 2026
The bill prioritizes protecting minors from sexual exploitation, self-harm risk, deceptive AI interactions, and addictive design by imposing disclosure, safety protocols, and parental controls — but those protections raise compliance costs, risk overbroad blocking and reduced mental-health/companionship features for teens, and may disproportionately burden smaller developers.
Children and teens interacting with AI will be clearly told the system is not human, reducing deception and helping parents understand when conversations are with an AI.
Minors will be shielded from sexualized content and sexual solicitation by AI services, lowering the risk of exploitation and harmful exposure.
AI must follow suicide and self-harm response protocols for minors and refer at-risk youth to crisis services, increasing chances of timely help.
AI operators will incur compliance costs to implement monitoring, filters, disclaimers, parental tools, and crisis protocols, which could raise consumer prices or reduce available services.
Broad, vaguely defined 'reasonable measures' requirements risk overblocking benign content and reducing functionality for minors (false positives), limiting access to useful or educational material.
Disclosure, no-simulacrum rules, and the prohibition on representing licensed mental-health services may reduce empathetic conversational features and helpful automated mental-health supports that some teens rely on.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Requires public conversational AI to disclose AI, block sexualization and certain engagement mechanics with minors, provide parental controls and crisis referrals, and forbids posing as licensed mental-health providers, enforced by the FTC.
Requires operators of conversational AI services available to the public to follow safety and transparency rules when interacting with minors. The bill mandates visible AI disclosure, bans certain engagement tactics and sexually explicit or sexualizing outputs involving minors, requires parental controls and suicide/self-harm response protocols, forbids representing the AI as a licensed mental health professional, and directs the FTC to enforce the rules. The law defines key terms, excludes specified narrow categories of systems, and becomes effective one year after enactment.