AI and children refers to the distinct set of risks AI systems pose to minors and the body of litigation, state legislation, and federal proposals that has accumulated in response. It is the child-safety counterpart to the broader AI-companion and platform-design topics, and as of mid-2026 one of the more legislatively active areas of US AI policy.
Why children are treated as a distinct category
Several AI risk surfaces are amplified for children rather than for general-purpose users. Companion chatbots raise concerns about emotional dependence: persuasive, always-available conversational agents can foster unhealthy attachment, displace human relationships, and, in the cases now in litigation, allegedly contribute to self-harm. This is the surface driving the cases described below. Generative systems can also produce sexual, self-harm, or violent content, and social and messaging platforms can enable adult-to-minor contact. A developmental and capacity asymmetry underlies the regulatory response: children are less able to recognize that they are interacting with a machine, to discount its outputs, or to consent meaningfully to data collection, which is the rationale offered for default-off and parental-consent regimes.
Litigation
A cluster of suits anchors this area. Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc. is a wrongful-death suit treated as the bellwether for companion-chatbot liability. Pennsylvania v. Character.AI is a state enforcement action against the same companion-AI category. Tumbler Ridge Families v. OpenAI extends the theory to a general-purpose assistant. These cases supply the driving facts that the legislative activity repeatedly cites (Source: Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc.).
State legislation
New York Safe By Design Act (FY27 budget, May 28, 2026) (New York) was included in the FY27 budget on May 28, 2026. It requires covered social-media, gaming, and messaging platforms to block adult contact with minors, requires parental consent for under-13s, applies default design protections for under-17s without age verification, and defaults AI-companion access off for minors (Source: iapp.org).
California SB 243 — Companion Chatbots sets California's companion-AI restrictions and served as an early state template for the under-18 protections that other states have echoed.
Connecticut SB 5 — Broad AI law (frontier reporting + ADMT + AI companions + sandbox) (Connecticut) was signed May 28, 2026. Among its bundled regimes are AI-companion transparency rules, including a ban on use by minors under 18.
Federal legislation and preemption
CHATBOT Act (Cruz–Schatz–Curtis–Schiff, April 2026) and the KIDS Act represent the federal track. The federalism question is unresolved. When New York enacted the Safe By Design Act, AG Letitia James simultaneously led 43 state attorneys general opposing the federal KIDS Act on preemption grounds, the children's-safety front of the broader AI-federalism dispute (Source: iapp.org). Marsha Blackburn is a leading federal voice; her "one rulebook for AI" framing situates child safety inside the preemption debate (Source: Why America Needs One Rulebook for AI — Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Daily Signal op-ed, January 2026)).
Schools
Child-safety concerns extend into education. On May 27, 2026, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten unveiled a 10-point AI plan calling for required AI-vendor standards in schools, bans on certain devices and applications for classroom use, and a technology-company tax to fund education (Source: insideaipolicy.com). See Education — AI Deployment.
Contested design questions
The legislation clusters around a few contested levers. On age verification, New York avoids mandating it, relying on default design instead, an approach intended to avoid the First Amendment and privacy objections that have defeated verification mandates elsewhere. Other open levers are default-off versus opt-in for companion access, parental consent thresholds, and the platform versus developer allocation of duty.
Most minor-specific AI restrictions are conditioned on knowing which users are minors, which makes age verification the gating mechanism for the rest of the regime. Legislative drafting has moved toward defining it negatively — the GUARD Act provides that self-attestation and birth-date entry "is not sufficient" and bars inference from a shared IP address or hardware identifier — while deployers have begun building classifier-based alternatives that avoid collecting identity documents at the cost of misclassification in both directions (S. 3062 — GUARD Act of 2025, as introduced (119th Congress); Update to GPT-5 System Card: GPT-5.2 (OpenAI, December 2025)).
Relationships
- instance-of: AI Companions (the companion-harm subset)
- related: AI Federalism, State-Level AI Regulation, Education — AI Deployment, Media, Journalism & Entertainment — AI Deployment, Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc., Pennsylvania v. Character.AI, Tumbler Ridge Families v. OpenAI, New York Safe By Design Act (FY27 budget, May 28, 2026), California SB 243 — Companion Chatbots, Connecticut SB 5 — Broad AI law (frontier reporting + ADMT + AI companions + sandbox), CHATBOT Act (Cruz–Schatz–Curtis–Schiff, April 2026), Marsha Blackburn, Letitia James, Character.AI
Provenance note. Built from the IAPP May 28 legislative round-up plus existing litigation and legislation pages;
confidence: medium. The[[concepts/ai-companions]]anchor is referenced but not yet created.