The GUARD Act Fails to Guard Kids’ Best Interests on AI Companions
The Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue Act (GUARD Act) passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously in late April and awaits a Senate vote. Introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) with nineteen bipartisan cosponsors, the bill aims to protect children from AI companions. But while the goal is laudable, the approach is not. Despite its acronym, the GUARD Act is less a regulatory framework to protect kids than a ban to keep them off chatbots entirely by trampling free speech, importing the worst features of existing age-verification regimes, and cutting parents out of the equation.
Sen. Hawley claims the bill does not ban children from chatbots, but it would limit users under 18 from accessing “AI companions”, chatbots designed to show empathy, ask personal questions, and provide emotional support. Many AI companions can benefit minors by serving as therapists, personalized tutors, or coaches, offering benefits for young people on-demand and in a lower-pressure environment compared to real-world interactions. They use them for advice, social skill practice, emotional support, or simply because they are fun and kids are curious. Most young people use them as a tool. They don’t confuse them with a friend.
The GUARD Act bans kids from using AI companions by requiring these platforms to verify if users are under 18. Existing age verification laws have largely focused on adult websites and social media platforms and have produced a familiar set of problems: More accurate age verification methods, such as ID checks, create free speech and privacy risks for all users, including adults, and many verification methods are easy for youth to circumvent. AI chatbot or companion bans raise similar First Amendment concerns, making the GUARD Act unlikely to hold up to scrutiny in court because it restricts access to a wide swath of speech and is not content-neutral.
Moreover, the GUARD Act leaves no room for parental oversight. There is no provision for parental consent to use AI companions or for parents to register a child’s account. Policymakers should strengthen parents' ability to manage their children's digital experiences, not substitute government mandates for parental authority. Parents should be able to tailor their children’s online experiences based on their child’s unique needs and their family’s priorities. And children’s independence and autonomy over their own online experiences should grow as they get older—a blanket ban for all minors does not account for differences in maturity between a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old, or even between two different 16-year-olds.
The newly amended GUARD Act also states this bill will not preempt state legislation, meaning that the bill would not only fail to meaningfully protect children, but it would also fail to address the patchwork of state bills governing children’s use of AI chatbots and companions.
Congress should reject blanket bans like the GUARD Act that would create more problems than they solve. Instead of cutting youth off from technology, a better approach for policymakers to keep children safe when using AI companion chatbots would be to focus on providing more transparency about the types of conversations AI companions might engage in with children and improving parental controls to allow for greater customization. Policymakers at every level should resist the impulse to ban AI companions outright and instead focus on building better guardrails, which the GUARD Act ironically fails to do.
