Lawmaker introduces bill to ban AI chatbots in children’s toys, urges disclosure on companion bots

A lawmaker on the floor Tuesday said they had introduced the "AI Children’s Toy Safety Act," calling for an immediate ban on the manufacture, sale, importation and distribution in the United States of any toy that incorporates an AI chatbot. "I recently introduced the AI Children's Toy Safety Act," the lawmaker said.

The remarks placed the proposed bill in a broader argument about technology and society. Citing a recent interview by former Sen. Ben Sasse with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the lawmaker said the next major social divide will be how people incorporate technology into their lives rather than traditional divisions such as class or gender.

The lawmaker argued that widespread adoption of generative AI could "turbocharge the worst parts of how we use technology," and listed harms including deepfakes, identity theft, placelessness and social isolation. On children's products specifically, the lawmaker said "this poses serious data privacy challenges for children and risks locking them into addictive and unpredictable engagement patterns," and warned that chatbots trained on adult-generated data could expose minors to explicit content.

The lawmaker also pointed to industry practices, naming major AI providers and saying their terms of service generally say products "should not be used by unsupervised children under the age of 13," yet some companies have licensed their services to toy makers. "Nearly every major AI service provider such as OpenAI, Google, Perplexity AI, xAI, and Anthropic have terms of service that state their product should not be used by unsupervised children under the age of 13," the lawmaker said.

In addition to the toy ban, the lawmaker said they plan to introduce a House companion to Senator Josh Hawley’s Guard Act. That companion, the lawmaker said, would bar AI companies from developing romantic-companion chatbots for minors and would require companies to disclose nonhuman status to all users to prevent minors from being tricked by artificial displays of empathy or affection. "I'm also looking to introduce a House companion bill to Senator Josh Hawley's Guard Act, which bans AI companies from developing romantic companion chatbots for minors and mandates that AI companies disclose their nonhuman status to all users," the lawmaker said.

No formal vote or committee referral was recorded during the remarks. The proposal as presented would be a statutory ban; the lawmaker framed the measure as balancing American innovation and national-security goals with a "human-centric ethical framework."