How Is AI Being Regulated for Children?

Child safety is one of the few areas of AI policy with broad bipartisan agreement, and one of the areas most federal preemption proposals explicitly leave to the states.

The concerns cluster around four things: AI chatbots and "companions" that interact with minors, sexualized deepfakes of children, collection of children's data, and how platforms verify a user's age.

Existing federal law already covers some of this. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act limits data collection from children under 13, and the Take It Down Act criminalizes non-consensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated images of minors.

States have gone further, passing rules on age verification, design standards for services used by minors, and disclosure requirements for AI companion apps. Several of those laws are being challenged in court, often on First Amendment or privacy grounds.

Supporters argue that minors face specific, documented harms and that platforms should carry clear duties.

Critics, including some civil-liberties groups, argue that strict age verification requires collecting sensitive identity data from everyone and can restrict lawful speech. The unresolved questions are who checks age, what happens to that data, and how far a platform's duty of care extends.