Draft bill 644 would ban AI‑provided therapy, restrict chatbots and set civil penalties
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Summary
Draft bill 644, presented to the committee, would bar offering or advertising AI‑provided mental health services in Vermont, require that therapeutic communications be delivered by licensed humans, cite academic findings of chatbot harms and deaths in bill findings, and assign enforcement authority to the attorney general and professional regulators.
The committee reviewed draft bill 644, which focuses on mental health chatbots and the use of artificial intelligence in therapeutic settings.
Katie McLean, Office of Legislative Council, summarized the bill's findings and purpose, saying the measure "to safeguard individuals seeking mental health services in Vermont from psychological harm, including death by suicide, by ensuring that these services are delivered by mental health professionals and not AI systems." The bill recites research from academic centers and watchdog groups that evaluated therapy chatbots and reported inappropriate responses, failures to recognize crises, and reported suicides linked in some cases to AI interactions.
Under the draft, a person, corporation, or other entity would be prohibited from offering, providing, or advertising mental health services that use AI in whole or in part, with limited carve‑outs for administrative uses and for activities expressly allowed in Title 26. McLean said the prohibition would be enforced by the attorney general when a corporation or non‑individual entity offers or advertises such services, while the Office of Professional Regulation (OPR) would enforce professional‑practice provisions for individual clinicians.
The draft designates violations as violations of the Vermont Consumer Protection Act and includes a civil penalty of $10,000 per violation as cited in the text; the attorney general would have authority to investigate and bring civil actions. The bill also adds unprofessional‑conduct language for mental‑health professions when a practitioner uses AI contrary to the listed standards.
McLean noted the bill's broad list of mental‑health professionals covered by the restrictions — including physicians and APRNs specializing in psychiatric care, psychologists, certified peer‑support providers, social workers, counselors, marriage and family therapists, applied behavior analysts and others — and described required definitions for therapeutic communications and administrative support. The draft would allow certain administrative uses of AI (scheduling, billing, transcription) provided the professional assumes responsibility, informs clients where appropriate and obtains consent for transcriptions or reporting uses.
Committee members asked for comparisons between draft bills and said they would schedule witness testimony to probe claims cited in the findings and how enforcement and exemptions would operate in practice.
