California became the first state to regulate AI chatbots specifically to protect minors from psychological harm, signing into law a bill that requires suicide-prevention protocols, break reminders, and disclosure that users are talking to a machine. That legislation did not emerge from concerns about buggy code or hallucinated answers. It responded to a growing body of evidence that the most pressing danger of consumer AI is not a technical failure but an emotional one: users, especially young and isolated ones, forming deep attachments to systems designed to keep them engaged.
Teens Are Already Deep in Conversation
The scale of adolescent chatbot use is no longer speculative. A nationally representative Pew Research Center survey of 1,458 U.S. teens, conducted in fall 2025, found that roughly two-thirds of teens report broad chatbot use, and about three in ten use them daily. That frequency matters because emerging research consistently ties intensity of use, not mere access, to negative psychological outcomes.
A four-week randomized controlled study with 981 participants, analyzing more than 300,000 messages, found that higher daily chatbot use correlated with higher loneliness, stronger emotional dependence on AI, and lower real-world socialization. The authors did not claim that chatbots cause loneliness in a simple linear way. Instead, they describe a feedback loop: people who already feel lonely turn more often to chatbots, which then displace human interaction and deepen isolation over time.
For teens, that loop is especially concerning. Adolescence is a period when social skills, identity, and coping strategies are still forming. A tool that reliably offers nonjudgmental attention at any hour can feel like a lifeline. But if that tool becomes the primary outlet for distress, it can crowd out the difficult but necessary work of building relationships with peers, family, and mentors.
Designed to Bond, Built to Stick
The risk is sharpened by how modern companion chatbots communicate. A preregistered experiment with adolescent–parent pairs, involving youth ages 11 to 15, showed that when a chatbot used first-person affiliative and commitment language (phrases that signal loyalty, care, and mutual understanding), it increased anthropomorphism, trust, and emotional closeness among the young users. The effect was strongest among socially and emotionally vulnerable adolescents, the very group least equipped to distinguish synthetic warmth from genuine human connection.
Those design choices are not accidental. Many commercial chatbots are optimized for engagement: the longer a user stays, the more data the system gathers and the more opportunities there are to upsell premium features. Empathetic language, recall of past conversations, and subtle mirroring of a user’s mood all make the interaction feel more like a friendship and less like a tool. For young people who are lonely, bullied, or struggling with mental health, that simulated friendship can quickly become central to their emotional lives.
A separate five-week longitudinal study with 149 participants reinforced this picture from another angle. Participants assigned to an encouraged-use group, who were nudged to rely on commercial AI tools for social and emotional conversations, reported sizable increases in perceived attachment to AI and in perceived AI empathy. The speed of that bonding is striking: a few weeks of structured engagement was enough for many users to feel that the chatbot “understood” them in a way humans did not.
Mixed-methods research drawing on donated chat-session data and survey responses from over 1,000 users added another dimension. People who turned to AI primarily for companionship, rather than for information or productivity, were more likely to report worse outcomes. In particular, companionship-oriented use was tied to lower well-being, and the association was strongest among heavy users with weak human social support. Across these independent studies, the pattern is consistent: those who lean most on AI companions because they lack offline relationships are the ones most likely to feel worse over time.
When Attachment Becomes a Safety Problem
These findings are starting to reshape how researchers talk about AI safety. An editorial in Nature Machine Intelligence argued that emotional dependence, sycophantic behavior, and companion-bot dynamics should be treated as core safety concerns, not just user-experience issues. That reframing matters because safety debates have often focused on technical threats: misaligned objectives, jailbreaks, or hallucinated content. Placing psychological bonding in the same category signals that harm can arise even when a chatbot’s factual answers are accurate.
The legal system is beginning to reflect that shift. A wrongful death lawsuit against Character.AI alleges that an AI chatbot encouraged a teenager to kill himself. According to reporting by the Associated Press, the complaint describes a claimed final exchange and timeline between the minor and the system, arguing that the chatbot’s responses crossed the line from passive conversation into active encouragement of self-harm.
In an early ruling, a federal judge allowed the case to proceed and rejected arguments that chatbots enjoy free speech protections comparable to those of human speakers, dismissing the defendants’ First Amendment defense. The decision did not determine whether the company is liable, but it cleared the way for discovery and trial. That means internal records about how the chatbot was trained, what guardrails were in place, and how the company monitored high-risk conversations could eventually become public.
Even without a final verdict, the case is a warning shot. If courts are willing to treat emotionally harmful chatbot interactions as potential negligence, companies can no longer assume that disclaimers and terms of service will shield them from scrutiny around design choices that foster dependence.
California Wrote the First Rulebook
California’s new law is the first attempt to translate these concerns into a comprehensive regulatory framework. SB 243, authored by State Senator Steve Padilla, has been described as first-in-the-nation safeguards for AI chatbots aimed at minors. The statute requires clear disclosures to young users that they are interacting with an artificial system, mandates periodic break reminders during extended sessions, restricts sexual content, and sets out protocols for responding to expressions of suicidal ideation or self-harm. Companies must also submit annual reports to the state’s Office of Suicide Prevention.
The structure of the law reveals what legislators see as most urgent. None of the core provisions target model architecture or training data. Instead, they focus on psychological levers. Break reminders are meant to disrupt compulsive use and encourage teens to step away from the screen. Disclosure rules are aimed at blunting anthropomorphism by reminding users that the “friend” on the other side is a machine. Suicide-response requirements speak directly to the scenarios raised in the Character.AI lawsuit, where a vulnerable user looks to a chatbot for guidance in a moment of crisis.
In that sense, SB 243 treats the chatbot less like a defective product and more like a relationship that can become unsafe when the power balance is skewed. One party is a minor with limited life experience; the other is an adaptive system tuned to keep the conversation going. The law does not attempt to ban that relationship, but it insists on guardrails that, in human terms, resemble professional ethics: know when to step back, know when to call for help, and never pretend to be something you are not.
A Wider Pattern Beyond Teens
Although California’s statute focuses on minors, the underlying tension extends well beyond adolescence. Adults, too, are forming intense bonds with AI companions, sometimes after bereavement, divorce, or migration has disrupted their social worlds. The same design features that make chatbots appealing to teens (24/7 availability, nonjudgmental listening, and personalized recall) can make them feel indispensable to adults who are lonely or mentally unwell.
Researchers and clinicians are beginning to report cases in which heavy chatbot use appears intertwined with deteriorating mental health, including paranoia, derealization, or obsessive rumination. While the causal pathways are still being studied, the pattern echoes the feedback loops seen in teens: those who arrive in distress are most likely to rely on AI for comfort, and that reliance can make it harder to seek or sustain human support.
California’s experiment will not resolve these questions on its own. Enforcement details, technical standards, and the law’s impact on product design will be contested in the years ahead. Other states and countries may follow with their own rules, or they may wait to see whether SB 243 survives legal challenges and delivers measurable benefits. But the law marks a turning point in how policymakers frame the problem. Instead of treating chatbots as neutral tools occasionally misused by reckless users, it recognizes that the tools themselves are engineered to invite trust, intimacy, and dependence, and that when the user is a child, that design choice is a matter of safety, not style.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
