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By India McCarty
New legislation intended to protect young people from the dangers of AI chatbots is making its way through the Senate.
“The sad reality is that innocent children are being harmed by predatory AI chatbots — even the ones that may be designed for kids or act like their best friends,” Donna Rice Hughes, President and CEO of Enough Is Enough, an organization devoted to raising awareness about AI, said in a statement. “It is past time for Big Tech to be held accountable to design its products with children’s safety in mind, but parents also deserve more resources and default parental control safety measures as well.”
Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are working on holding these companies accountable with new legislation.
Cruz, along with Senators Brian Schatz, John Curtis and Adam Schiff, introduced the CHATBOT Act, which would require AI companies to establish “family accounts” for parents to manage how and when their children use chatbots. The bots would limit many of their more “manipulative” features, as well as require parental consent and parental controls and prohibit targeted advertising to children.
Related: ‘I Want to Have My Normal Brain Back’: Teens Catch on to AI Dangers
“The rapid development of sophisticated chatbots has left many parents in the dark as powerful AI systems enter children’s lives,” Cruz said in a statement. “Congress has an opportunity to put parents back in control. With the right safeguards, AI systems can benefit a child’s education without putting their well-being at risk. The CHATBOT Act ensures America leads in deploying AI safely and responsibly.”
Schiff added, “It is essential that we institute commonsense guardrails on the use of AI chatbots by children and teenagers that empower parents’ ability to protect their kids…This moment demands action to protect children’s health and safety online, and I’m proud to join Senators Cruz, Schatz and Curtis in introducing this bipartisan legislation as a first step towards that goal.”
Meanwhile, Hawley’s GUARD Act was unanimously passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The GUARD Act will protect children from abusive sexual and self-harming content, as well as creating “emotional companions” out of AI chatbots.
My bill to stop AI from telling kids to kill themselves just passed out of committee UNANIMOUSLY.
No amount of profit justifies the DESTRUCTION of our children. Time to bring this bill to the Senate floor
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) April 30, 2026
“I mean, it is the worst kind of grooming,” Hawley told Fox News. “If that was a thing done by a human, the human would be in jail. We would call that sexual grooming.”
He continued, “No amount of profit justifies the deliberate taking of a child’s well-being, and these companies know very well that this is going on.”
These new pieces of legislation will hopefully help protect children from the dangers posed by AI.
Read Next: Is ChatGPT Responsible for This Teen’s Death? His Parents Think So
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