The CHATBOT Act says that nothing in it shall be construed to require a company to “implement an age gating or age verification” system, or to “affirmatively collect any personal data with respect to the age of any individual that the covered entity is not already collecting in the normal course” of its business. The Kids Online Safety Act carries a version of the same promise, ruling out “the affirmative collection of any personal data with respect to the age of users” that a platform doesn’t already gather.
But now read the rest of the same bills…
Yesterday, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee sent four children’s online safety bills to the Senate floor, with parents who attribute the harm of their children to social media sitting right there in the room. KOSA went through on a unanimous voice vote. This obviously wasn’t a place for a debate. The Youth AI Privacy Act from Senator Ed Markey advanced. So did the CHATBOT Act from Senator Ted Cruz, with Senators Schatz, Curtis and Schiff as co-sponsors. Senator Tammy Duckworth’s bill makes four, and it orders the FTC and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to study AI-enabled toys, which turns on nothing a company has to know about a user. A fifth, the SCREEN Act, got a tally and no result, which we’ll come back to.
KOSA passed the Senate in 2024 by 91 to 3, but the House never took it up. KOSA’s “duty of care” is the provision that gets the attention. It requires platforms to “exercise reasonable care” in design features to prevent and mitigate a listed set of harms to minors, with the FTC enforcing, and the harms run from conditions with “clinically diagnosable symptoms” through patterns of use “that indicate compulsive” behavior to sexual exploitation. The House stripped it out. The Senate sponsors called that version dead on arrival.
Hellbound and Down 