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California State Senator and author of SB 903, quoted saying AI algorithms are not fit to replace human therapists.
No evidence-backed relationships are recorded.
California now holds chatbot companies liable for failing to take reasonable measures against harmful outputs. OpenAI, Google, Meta and Amazon all sat in the negotiations that wrote the standard.
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Adam's Law makes age-bracket signals, pre-release risk assessments and crisis routing conditions of shipping a companion chatbot to children in California. A second bill takes personalized feeds away from under-16 users.
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California's new law regulates how a chatbot behaves toward a child, listing the manipulation patterns operators must design out. The statute grades some of those patterns without quantifying them, and how an auditor measures them is the open question.
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California's AB 1709 bars autoplay, infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations for users under 16. The companion-chatbot law signed the same day requires operators to take age brackets from the operating system.
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The bill cleared Assembly Appropriations 13-0 and has collected one no vote across four recorded tallies. If it passes, "companion chatbot" stops being positioning and becomes a regulated category.
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