California required companion chatbots to disclose and refer

SB 243 defines companion chatbots and requires disclosure, self-harm protocols and minor safeguards from 1 January 2026.

Historical event

October 13, 2025

First source published

October 13, 2025

Site publication

September 18, 2026

What happened

On 13 October 2025 the governor of California approved Senate Bill 243, filed with the Secretary of State the same day and chaptered as Chapter 677 of the Statutes of 2025. The enacted text adds Chapter 22.6, sections 22601 through 22606, to the Business and Professions Code, under the label 'Companion Chatbots'. It defines a companion chatbot as an AI system with a natural-language interface that gives adaptive, human-like responses, can meet a user's social needs, exhibits anthropomorphic features and can sustain a relationship across multiple interactions. The definition excludes customer-service and internal-business bots, video-game characters confined to game topics, and stand-alone voice assistants that do not sustain an ongoing relationship.

What the documents show

The statute, now codified as Business and Professions Code section 22602, requires an operator to issue a clear notification that a companion chatbot is artificially generated whenever a reasonable person might otherwise be misled, and bars a chatbot from engaging users unless the operator maintains a published protocol for detecting and responding to expressions of suicidal ideation, suicide or self-harm, including referral to crisis services. For a user an operator knows is a minor, the chatbot must disclose that it is artificial intelligence, repeat a break reminder at least every three hours, and take reasonable measures against generating sexually explicit material or urging a minor toward it. From 1 July 2027 operators must report crisis-referral counts and safety protocols annually to the Office of Suicide Prevention, which will publish the data.

The mechanism

The law does not mandate a blanket disclosure banner on every screen. It ties the notice duty to a reasonable-person deception standard, and separates three obligations: an anti-deception notice, a self-harm detection-and-referral protocol, and minor-specific engagement limits. Enforcement runs through the Business and Professions Code plus a new private right of action: a person who suffers injury in fact may sue for an injunction, the greater of actual damages or $1,000 per violation, and attorney's fees.

What it leaves open

The chaptered text contains no urgency clause, so under the state's standard rule for non-urgency statutes it takes effect on 1 January 2026, a date the enacted text does not spell out itself; this is an editorial inference from the absence of an urgency clause, not a statement the bill makes. The statute relies on what an operator knows about a user's age rather than requiring age verification, and its reporting duty does not begin until mid-2027, so no public compliance data exists yet. How courts will read 'reasonable person would be misled' for a chatbot marketed as a persona is untested.

• Does the app disclose, unprompted, that the user is talking to software rather than a person?
• What does its published self-harm protocol actually require the chatbot to do, and who checks that it happens?
• If the operator does not know a user is a minor, do the minor-specific protections apply?

SB 243 is notable less for any single rule than for treating disclosure, crisis referral and minor protection as three separate duties inside one named product category, giving regulators and litigants a target older consumer-protection statutes did not provide.

Sources & reading trail

Full enacted text: definitions, disclosure duty, self-harm protocol, minor protections, reporting and the private right of action.

Source published: 13 October 2025 · Retrieved: 16 September 2026

Confirms the provisions are codified as Chapter 22.6 (sections 22601-22606), added by Statutes 2025, Chapter 677, section 1.

Source published: Not established · Retrieved: 16 September 2026

Company documents, filings, studies and official records establish the record; the reading and the questions are Lovebot Journal editorial analysis. This retrospective draft does not imply the site published on the event date.

Continue reading

• A wrongful-death suit treated a companion app's persona as a product
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• Crisis pop-ups differ across chatbots and one new law
• Browse the complete the archive

Published September 18, 2026, not on the date of the event described.