SB 1119: Companion chatbots: children’s safety.

Existing law generally regulates artificial intelligence, including companion chatbots, as defined. Existing law requires an operator, as defined, to prevent a companion chatbot on its companion chatbot platform from engaging with users unless the operator maintains a protocol for preventing the production of suicidal ideation, suicide, or self-harm content to the user. Existing law requires an operator, for a user the operator knows is a minor, to take certain prescribed action, including disclosing to the user that the user is interacting with artificial intelligence.

This bill would delete those provisions imposing requirements on an operator if the operator knows the user is a minor.

The Digital Age Assurance Act requires a person who owns, maintains, or controls a software application, as defined, to request age bracket data sent by a real-time secure application programming interface or operating system with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.

This bill would impose a duty on an operator to ensure that a companion chatbot does not pose an unreasonable risk of a covered harm to a minor and require an operator, as defined, of a companion chatbot to, on or before beginning July 1, 2027, and subsequently thereafter before making a new or substantially modified companion chatbot available to users in the state, do various things with respect to child safety, including perform and document a comprehensive risk assessment related to the design, configuration, and operation of the companion chatbot with respect to minor users that contains contains, among other things, a summary of the results of any evaluation of each covered harm, as defined, pertaining to the companion chatbot. The bill would require an operator to submit to independent child safety audits of its compliance with the bill, as specified, and would require, within 90 days of completing a child safety audit, the auditor to produce and submit an AI child safety audit report to the Attorney General for any audited companion chatbot specified. The bill would require an auditor to produce a report that describes whether the operator has established and adhered to policies and practices to comply with the bill that includes, among other things, the signature of the lead auditor certifying the results of the audit under penalty of perjury. By expanding the scope of the crime of perjury, this bill would impose a state-mandated local program. The bill would, except as specified, require the unredacted version of those audit reports submitted to the Attorney General to be kept confidential. would authorize the Attorney General to, for cause, request and obtain a copy of an AI child safety audit report from the operator and would make a child safety audit report submitted to the Attorney General confidential.

This bill would authorize a public prosecutor certain public prosecutors to bring a certain civil action to enforce the bills provisions provisions, as specified, and would authorize a child who suffers a covered an actual harm as a result of a violation of this chapter, or a parent or guardian acting on behalf of that child, to bring a civil action against the operator to obtain, among other relief, punitive damages. operator, as specified.

Existing constitutional provisions require that a statute that limits the right of access to the meetings of public bodies or the writings of public officials and agencies be adopted with findings demonstrating the interest protected by the limitation and the need for protecting that interest.

This bill would make legislative findings to that effect.

The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement.

This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this act for a specified reason.