The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 22-0 on Thursday to advance the GUARD Act, a bill that would require AI chatbot companies to verify the age of every American who wants to use them.
The legislation, sponsored by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, sailed through committee with a tweet from its author celebrating the outcome.
“My bill to stop AI from telling kids to kill themselves just passed out of committee UNANIMOUSLY,” Hawley wrote on X. “No amount of profit justifies the DESTRUCTION of our children. Time to bring this bill to the Senate floor.”
As usual, the framing is about children but the result is age verification/digital ID for everyone.
Under the bill’s text, a “reasonable age verification measure” cannot mean a checkbox or a self-entered birth date. It cannot rely on whether a user shares an IP address or hardware identifier with someone already verified as an adult.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
What it can mean, the legislation makes clear, is a government ID upload, a facial scan, or a financial record tied to your legal name. Every user of every covered chatbot would need to hand one of those over before being allowed in.
The bill defines an “artificial intelligence chatbot” as any service that “produces new expressive content or responses not fully predetermined by the developer or operator” and “accepts open-ended natural-language or multimodal user input.”
That language reaches well beyond the companion apps the press conference focused on. It covers customer service bots, search assistants powered by AI, homework helpers, and the general-purpose tools millions of adults already use without proving who they are.
Hellbound and Down 