How Google Is Drafting State AI Chatbot Laws

Google has quietly helped shape artificial intelligence chatbot safety legislation in at least 10 U.S. states, according to an NPR investigation published Sept. 18. The reporting found that bills introduced across the country share verbatim or near-identical language and contain exemptions that could spare the most widely used chatbots—including Google’s own Gemini—from the very rules they purport to establish.

The findings raise uncomfortable questions about how corporate influence is shaping the first generation of AI safety law in the absence of federal regulation. They also arrive amid mounting legal and emotional fallout from harms linked to chatbots, particularly among minors.

A Grieving Mother’s Fight

Much of the NPR investigation centers on Cynthia Montoya, a Thornton, Colorado, mother whose 13-year-old daughter, Juliana, died by suicide in November 2023 after using AI chatbots. A forensic analysis of Juliana’s phone revealed the bots had introduced her to sexual content she had not invited or initiated.

Citing Montoya, NPR reported that Juliana mentioned wanting to take her life 52 times, in the account later detailed by Denver7, and that the chatbot never surfaced a suicide prevention hotline or guided her toward a trusted adult. The chatbots Juliana used were products built by Character.AI, which settled multiple lawsuits—including with the Montoya family—in January 2026.

Montoya channeled her grief into advocacy, pushing Colorado lawmakers to write protections for minors. Instead, she said, she watched the legislation emerge with loopholes intact.

“There are get-out-of-jail-free cards for the tech industries,” Montoya told NPR. “There’s no duty of care. There’s nothing in the bill that says when a piece of technology is being developed that companies must take ownership to develop it responsibly.”

The Colorado Case

Colorado’s House Bill 26-1263 was introduced in February 2026 and signed into law in May as the Chatbot Safety Act. According to NPR, it was written in collaboration with Healthier Colorado, a nonprofit focused on state policy, which a person with knowledge of the situation said worked with Google on the bill.

The law excludes 12 categories of chatbots, including products primarily designed for developers or researchers, those providing commerce or customer service assistance, chatbots housed within search engines, and products marketed for business productivity. Under those carve-outs, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude could potentially argue they are exempt, while Google’s Gemini could fall under the exemption for chatbots housed within search engines.

The bill’s sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Sean Camacho, defended the approach. “We had to make sure there are enough exemptions for the commercial use of AI, whether it’s insurance or a theme park, or [researching] fixing your car or on Gemini, or a search engine of any kind,” he told NPR. “No bill is perfect, and this one definitely isn’t. This is the first step.”

Healthier Colorado disputed the characterization that the law was authored by industry. “HB26-1263 is not an industry bill in disguise,” spokesperson Kate Morr said. “This law is a floor we intend to keep building on, not a ceiling.”

Identical Language, Many States

An investigation by Transformer News, published in March, first flagged the pattern: bills in six states—Colorado, Hawaii, Arizona, Georgia, Nebraska and Idaho—were structurally similar to an Oregon law but included new carve-outs shielding AI companies from liability.

The provisions clustered in three areas: exemptions for chatbots embedded in other services; limits on who can sue, often leaving enforcement only to state attorneys general; and narrow definitions of when extra protections apply to minors. In Hawaii, for example, companies must have “actual knowledge or reasonable certainty” that a user is a minor.

NPR found similar patterns nationally. An exemption for “a feature within another software application, web interface, or computer program” appears in bills in at least eight states, potentially covering Meta AI and Grok. In five states, bills contain identical language exempting voice assistants, which would cover Amazon’s Alexa. Some bills limit application to minor “account holders,” potentially exempting chatbots that require no registration, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Google lobbyists registered in support of chatbot bills in Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska and Arizona, according to lobbying disclosure records cited by NPR. In Hawaii, state Rep. Trish La Chica said lobbyists representing Google approached her to sponsor a bill she understood was written by the company.

“They mentioned other states, California and New York, and that they provided the language for chatbot bills,” La Chica told NPR. She declined to sponsor it, and the measure was ultimately vetted and signed as Act 248 after the proposed exemptions were removed.

A Google spokesperson told NPR the company “is committed to supporting thoughtful, effective AI legislation that protects consumers while fostering innovation” and that it “actively collaborate[s] with lawmakers, industry peers, and community advocates to help shape policy frameworks.”

A National Vacuum

The state-level push comes as federal regulation remains stalled. In a June 2026 executive order, the White House said the United States leads the world in AI “because we refuse to stifle this innovation with overly burdensome regulation.”

Federal legislative efforts have struggled to gain traction. NPR’s reporting in mid-September found that Congress is short on both time and consensus, with Republicans and Democrats sharply divided over whether preempting state laws is the right approach.

In that vacuum, states have become the primary regulators. California’s SB 243, enacted in 2025, established the first youth-specific chatbot protections and became a model for other states. The Future of Privacy Forum noted that the law relies on transparency, disclosure and safety protocols rather than outright bans—an approach that consumer advocates have criticized as industry-friendly.

At least 75 lawsuits have been filed in federal and state courts against AI developers over alleged chatbot harms, many involving children, according to NPR’s review of legal records. In March 2026, the family of Jonathan Gavalas, a 36-year-old Florida man who died by suicide in October 2025, sued Google, alleging his relationship with Gemini contributed to his death. In a statement, Google said that “unfortunately AI models are not perfect” but that Gemini had referred Gavalas to a crisis hotline.

Analysis: A Playbook, Not a Coincidence

The striking similarity of the bills across states is what most alarms watchdogs. In most cases, successful legislation spreads gradually from state to state over years. Introducing near-identical bills simultaneously in at least 10 states, with matching carve-outs, is highly unusual.

“We were suspicious because we were working in different states and we saw the exact same language, and Google would typically show up to lobby for the bills as well,” Mick Tobin, co-founder of the Young People’s Alliance, told NPR.

Marjorie Connolly of the Tech Oversight Project described the effort as a familiar strategy: “Big Tech companies actively seek liability shields, carve-outs, and exemptions, and they swept into state capitals this year trying to get them under the guise of regulating chatbots.”

Not every state embraced the approach. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed her state’s chatbot bill in June 2026, writing: “I will not protect big technology companies and AI chat bots more than children.” Chatbot bills were nonetheless enacted in Idaho, Georgia, Iowa, Washington, Nebraska and Oregon.

The stakes extend beyond politics. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found roughly 64% of U.S. teens use chatbots, with about three in 10 using them daily. For families like Montoya’s, the question of whether such laws provide real protection is not abstract.

What to Watch

Several threads will determine how this story unfolds. First, legal challenges are likely to test the boundaries of the new state laws and the extent to which carve-outs actually shield companies. Second, the Colorado law takes effect Jan. 1, 2027, and its enforcement record—including the strength of its $5,000-per-violation civil penalty—will offer an early test of whether such frameworks change corporate behavior.

Third, the federal preemption fight looms. If Congress moves to bar states from regulating AI, the state-by-state patchwork—loopholes and all—could be replaced by a single national framework still very much undefined.

For Montoya, a weak law is worse than no law at all, because it lets lawmakers consider the issue settled.

“My work is now harder because they passed this bill,” she said. “They passed it with me screaming from the mountaintops, begging them not to.”