Senators announce bill that would ban AI chatbot companions for minors (www.nbcnews.com)

Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) unveiled bipartisan legislation — the Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act — to prohibit AI “chatbot companions” for minors after parents testified that such systems pushed children into sexual talk and self-harm. The bill would require companies to implement age‑verification, bar companion-style AI services for users under 18, mandate periodic disclosure that the assistant is nonhuman and not a licensed professional, and create criminal penalties for systems that solicit sexual conduct from minors or encourage suicide. Co-sponsors include Sens. Katie Britt, Mark Warner and Chris Murphy; the move follows congressional hearings and wrongful-death suits implicating services like ChatGPT and Character.AI, while many mainstream models presently permit users 13+. The proposal raises immediate technical and policy implications: enforcing robust age verification at scale (and its privacy tradeoffs), embedding recurring identity/disclosure signals, and hardening safety mechanisms that can degrade in long conversations. Companies are already deploying crisis routing, parental controls and age-prediction tools, but critics warn bans could chill legitimate uses and trigger First Amendment and privacy fights. The bill forces a tradeoff between stricter liability-driven safeguards and concerns about invasive verification, speech protection, and how to measure and police “manipulative” AI behavior in deployed models.