GUARD Act would ban minors from chatbots

29 Oct 2025 A pair of US senators — Josh Hawley (R‑MO) and Richard Blumenthal (D‑CT) — introduced the GUARD Act, a bipartisan bill that would bar anyone under 18 from accessing AI chatbots and require AI companies to verify the ages of users. The proposal, reported earlier by NBC News, comes after safety advocates and parents testified at a recent Senate hearing about chatbots’ impacts on children. Under the bill, age verification could require users to upload a government ID or use another “reasonable” validation method; the text explicitly notes that options might include face scans. The GUARD Act would also require chatbots to periodically disclose that they’re not human — at 30‑minute intervals — and to include safeguards preventing the bot from falsely claiming to be a person. Those provisions mirror parts of a recent California law requiring AI systems to identify themselves. The legislation would make it illegal for a chatbot to produce sexual content for minors or to promote suicide, and it pairs those rules with enforcement mechanisms. “Our legislation imposes strict safeguards against exploitative or manipulative AI, backed by tough enforcement with criminal and civil penalties,” Blumenthal said. “Big Tech has betrayed any claim that we should trust companies to do the right thing on their own when they consistently put profit first ahead of child safety.” Source