States Passed Chatbot Safety Laws This Year. Some Of Them Might Not Cover ChatGPT.
An NPR investigation traced near identical chatbot bills across at least 10 states, the lobbyists behind them, and the exemptions that could leave the most popular chatbots outside the rules.
The Colorado State Capitol in Denver, 2023, where the Chatbot Safety Act passed this spring. Photo: xiquinhosilva, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A lot of states passed chatbot safety laws this year. Read the fine print on a few of them and you run into a strange question: does the law cover ChatGPT at all?
On September 18, 2026, NPR published an investigation by Katie McQue into how those bills got written. The short version is that many of them share the same language, the same exemptions, and in several states the same lobbyists. And according to the people NPR interviewed, some of that language could let the most popular chatbots on the market argue their way out.
A note before we go on, because this story starts with a death. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
The mother who wanted a say
Cynthia Montoya lives in Thornton, Colorado. Her daughter Juliana was 13 when she started talking to AI chatbots in 2023. She died by suicide that November. A forensic analysis of her phone by law enforcement found the bots had introduced her to sexual content she hadn’t asked for. Those were Character.AI products, and Character.AI settled multiple lawsuits in January 2026, including the Montoyas’.
Montoya went to her own legislators. She says one of the sponsors of Colorado’s chatbot bill, state Rep. Sean Camacho, told her she’d be invited to give input. Then his office went quiet for weeks. The bill was introduced in February without her.
She testified against it anyway. She told NPR she had to demand that senators look at the photo of her daughter she was holding, because they were having side conversations while she spoke. Governor Jared Polis signed the Chatbot Safety Act in May 2026.
“My work is now harder because they passed this bill,” Montoya told NPR. “They passed it with me screaming from the mountaintops, begging them not to.”
Twelve kinds of chatbot that don’t count
Colorado’s law excludes 12 categories of chatbots. Among them, per NPR: products primarily designed for developers or researchers, products for commerce or customer service, chatbots housed within search engines, and products marketed for business productivity. Developer tools, video games, voice assistants and chatbots built into social media are on the list too.
Here’s where it lands on this site’s namesake. Marjorie Connolly of the Tech Oversight Project told NPR that under that list, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude could potentially argue they’re exempt, because they were designed and marketed for developers and researchers before they turned into consumer products. Google’s Gemini could fall under the search engine exemption.
Her one line summary: “Parents are being asked to accept a chatbot law that exempts chatbots.”
Camacho’s explanation, in his own words to NPR: “We could not pass a bill that would make Colorado an outlier because the fear was that tech companies would just look past Colorado and wouldn’t offer their services here, or it couldn’t be enforced.” He also said, “No bill is perfect, and this one definitely isn’t.”
The account holder trick
The Colorado exemptions are only part of it. NPR found language that repeats across states almost word for word, and one version matters a lot for ChatGPT specifically.
Some bills limit their protections to minor “account holders.” A chatbot that doesn’t require you to register or build a profile might not be covered. NPR names two chatbots that fit that description: ChatGPT and Google Gemini. You can open ChatGPT in a browser and start typing without signing in. A 13 year old can too.
The other repeat offenders NPR counted:
- An exemption for “A feature within another software application, web interface, or computer program” appears in bills in at least eight states, including Idaho, Nebraska, New Jersey and Oklahoma. Analysts say it could cover Meta AI and Grok inside X.
- Identical language exempting voice assistants on consumer devices, the kind that would cover Alexa, appears in five states, with modified versions in 10 more.
- Bills with similar language showed up in at least 10 states this year, most of them modeled on California’s SB 243 from 2025.
Whose language is it
That’s the part NPR spends the most time on. Google lobbyists registered in support of chatbot bills in Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska and Arizona, according to state lobbying disclosures. A Republican lawmaker in Colorado told NPR, anonymously, that a Google lobbyist tried to get them to sponsor the bill. In Hawaii, state Rep. Trish La Chica said Google lobbyists brought her a framework she understood the company had written. She passed on it, and Hawaii’s law, Act 248, was vetted to take the lobbyists’ exemptions out before it was signed.
Google told NPR it “is committed to supporting thoughtful, effective AI legislation that protects consumers while fostering innovation.” Healthier Colorado, the nonprofit that worked on the Colorado bill, said it “is not an industry bill in disguise” and called the law “a floor we intend to keep building on, not a ceiling.”
Not every state went along. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed her state’s chatbot bill in June. “I will not protect big technology companies and AI chat bots more than children,” she wrote.
Why this is a ChatGPT story
NPR counted at least 75 lawsuits in federal and state courts over alleged harms from chatbots. One of them is the case of Adam Raine, the 16 year old from California who died by suicide in 2025 after confiding in ChatGPT, which offered to help write his suicide note. His family is suing OpenAI.
So the most talked about chatbot tragedy in the country involved ChatGPT. And the laws states passed in response include at least two doors ChatGPT could try to walk through: a developer and researcher exemption in Colorado, and account holder language that may not reach a kid who never logs in.
Nobody has tested either one in court yet. We’ll be watching for the first case that does, on our lawsuit tracker.
Sources: NPR, “How Google is drafting AI chatbot laws around the country,” Katie McQue, September 18, 2026. Photo: Colorado State Capitol, xiquinhosilva, October 1, 2023, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
