New York bans AI companion chatbots for minors in broadest US state law yet

New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law on Wednesday that blocks minors from using AI chatbots built to act as companions, a move a dev.to report describes as the broadest restriction any US state has yet placed on consumer-facing artificial intelligence. The statute obliges chatbot operators — including the makers of widely used services such as OpenAI's ChatGPT — to check the ages of their users and to substantially rework how their products behave for anyone under 18.

What the law requires

The rules reach well past content warnings. If a minor is using a chatbot, the system may not produce content that could lead the user to believe the AI "is human, alive, or experiences human emotions." The law also bars chatbots from generating output that suggests a personal relationship, a professional relationship or an authority-figure role with the user, and prohibits the AI from presenting what it says as a "personal opinion."

Speaking at the signing ceremony, Hochul was direct about the target, saying minors will no longer have access to chatbots that pose as their friends, boyfriends and girlfriends. She also framed the law as a privacy measure, arguing that chatbots should no longer be able to hold on to sensitive details about a minor's emotional and physical health.

The legislation arrives after months of reports about AI systems behaving in unexpected and sometimes harmful ways, particularly when young users treat chatbots as confidants or romantic partners. According to dev.to, lawmakers and child-safety advocates have grown increasingly alarmed by companion-style products that appeared to deepen isolation, encourage risky behavior, or blur the line between software and friendship for vulnerable teenagers.

Industry praise and pushback

The response splits along familiar lines. Tech:NYC, an industry advocacy group, criticized the law's vague language and warned that keeping kids safe online should not mean cutting them off from tools that help them learn and prepare for careers. OpenAI and Anthropic declined to comment when approached about the legislation, dev.to reports.

Child-safety organizations welcomed the measure. Common Sense Media, the nonprofit behind widely used media guidelines for parents, called it the strongest kids' AI safety bill in the country. Its CEO, Jim Steyer, went further, saying AI companies offer chatbot features that are dangerous — and, in his words, even deadly — for children and teenagers, and that those harmful features will now be outlawed in New York.

Other states, California among them, have already passed laws restricting chatbots. But dev.to notes that the New York statute uses some of the broadest regulatory language in the country, wording sweeping enough that it may well end up being tested in court.

A growing patchwork of state AI rules

The New York law is the latest sign that US states are not waiting for federal action on AI oversight. States have recently moved on everything from algorithmic management of workers — California passed its own landmark bill on that front — to data privacy enforcement in schools, while the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice continue to probe AI dominance at the biggest technology firms.

The compliance problem

For chatbot developers the practical burden is considerable. Age verification at scale is technically and legally thorny, forcing trade-offs between effectiveness and privacy. Behavior rules like New York's may demand different model configurations, prompts and guardrails for younger users — in effect creating two classes of AI product inside the same app. Companies now face a strategic choice between building state-specific compliance features or adopting the strictest common denominator nationwide.

Why it matters

New York has just set the high-water mark for state-level regulation of consumer AI, and the implications stretch well beyond one state. The law pushes the industry's biggest names into engineering changes — age gates and minor-safe behavior modes by default — that they can no longer treat as optional. It also invites litigation over its sweeping language, and whether it survives court scrutiny will shape how aggressively other states legislate copycat bills. For anyone building chatbots for the US market, compliance strategy is now a core product decision rather than an afterthought.