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Senate committee advances four'year moratorium on AI chatbots in toys for children
Summary
SB 867 would pause the sale and manufacture of AI chatbot toys aimed at children for four years while regulators develop testing and safety standards; supporters cited research showing safety, privacy and security risks, while retailers requested clearer definitions and liability language.
Sen. Alex Padilla presented SB 867 to impose a four'year moratorium on the sale and manufacture of AI'chatbot toys intended for children while lawmakers design a testing framework and regulatory guardrails.
Witnesses from PIRG (Fiona Hines, speaker 25), Children Now (Nicole Rocha, speaker 15) and Common Sense Media described research showing AI chat toys that can instruct children where to find dangerous objects, disclose explicit content, and lack parental controls. Hines said researchers tested three AI chat toys and found all three provided risky information and had security weaknesses (for example, the toy "Bondu" exposed large amounts of child'generated dialogue in an insecure database).
Industry witnesses including the California Retail Association (Ryan O'Lane, speaker 26) and the Civil Justice Association (Annalee Augustine, speaker 19) asked for narrower definitions of "toy" and for liability and compliance standards, including a knowing'standard and clarification of secondary liability for retailers.
Committee members expressed concern about definitional clarity and who would determine whether a product qualified as a toy for the statute's purposes; the author said the bill's companion work on companion AI definitions and existing health and safety code definitions would inform that drafting. The committee voted to pass SB 867 to appropriations (reported 7-0).
