Lawmakers Introduce Bills Restricting Kids' Use of AI Chatbots

The Senate and House moved competing AI-focused proposals this week that target child safety and national AI policy. The CHATBOT Act, introduced in the Senate by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) with co-sponsors Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and John Curtis (R-Utah), would require AI chatbot providers to implement "family accounts," parental consent for minors, default high-safety settings, limits on manipulative design features, and a ban on targeted advertising to children, according to a release from the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and a summary in Axios. The statutory text for related age-verification and minor-protection measures appears in congress.gov entries for companion bills such as S.2714, the CHAT Act, which defines covered "companion AI chatbot" products and directs FTC oversight.

In the House, sponsors introduced the American Leadership in AI Act, which sponsors say consolidates more than 20 bipartisan proposals drawn from the Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, according to a sponsors' release covered by PYMNTS and Axios. Separately, Rep. Erin Houchin (IN-09) reported that elements of her KIDS Act package advanced in the House Energy and Commerce Committee; her office explained that the package includes the AWARE Act, directing the Federal Trade Commission to develop public educational resources about AI chatbots, and the SAFEBOTs Act, which would require chatbots to disclose they are artificial, prohibit false claims of licensed professional status, provide crisis resources on self-harm prompts, and mandate session break prompts, per Houchin's press release.

Companies that build conversational AI and chatbots commonly face engineering trade-offs when adding parental controls and age-verification mechanisms. Industry-pattern observations: implementing family accounts and age gating typically requires changes to authentication flows, session management, data retention policies, and content-filtering pipelines; those changes can increase product complexity, testing surface area, and privacy-compliance obligations. Observers should note that default high-safety settings and restrictions on personalization reduce certain model-driven engagement signals and may require additional moderation tooling or safety classifiers.

Reporting by Axios highlights that sponsors and committee staff framed the CHATBOT Act as an effort to design rules that could survive constitutional scrutiny, noting First Amendment challenges have blocked some state-level kids' online safety laws. Reporting by PYMNTS and the sponsors' releases frames the American Leadership in AI Act as an attempt to codify recommendations from the Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and to expand federal research, procurement, and workforce initiatives. These parallel tracks - child-safety rules and national R&D/governance measures - place compliance, procurement, and governance topics on the congressional agenda simultaneously.

Industry observers will monitor committee markups and bill text changes for technical detail on age verification, parental-consent mechanisms, data-retention limits, and definitions of "manipulative features." Observers should also watch for DOJ, FTC, or agency rulemaking directives referenced in bill text, and for litigation risk, such as First Amendment challenges, as noted in Axios reporting. Finally, practitioners should track coordination across bills and any preemption language that would affect state-level rules.