The Chatbot Moment: Mapping the Emerging 2026 U.S. Chatbot Legislative Landscape
Special thanks to Rafal Fryc, U.S. Legislation Intern, for his research and development of the resources referenced.
If there is one area of AI policy that lawmakers seem particularly eager to regulate in 2026, it’s chatbots. As state legislative sessions ramp up across the country, policymakers at both the state and federal levels have introduced dozens of bills aimed at chatbots from so-called “AI companions” to “mental health chatbots.” The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) is currently tracking 98 chatbot-specific bills across 34 states, as well as three federal proposals.
Yet despite the shared concern driving these proposals (often tied to safety risks, youth protections, and several high-profile incidents involving chatbots and self-harm) the bills themselves look very different from one another. Definitions of “chatbot” vary widely across legislation. The result is the early contours of a potential regulatory patchwork, where different tools may fall within the scope of different state laws and where compliance obligations, like disclosures or safety protocols, could vary broadly across jurisdictions. As states including Oregon and Washington prepare to imminently enact new chatbot legislation, it remains to be seen how closely 2026 frameworks will ultimately align.
To help make sense of this rapidly evolving landscape, FPF developed two one-pager resources summarizing key trends in chatbot legislation. The first highlights some of the definitional patterns beginning to appear, identifying eleven legislative frameworks used to define chatbots. The second maps the six most common regulatory provisions appearing across chatbot bills.
With these resources, we explore two central questions shaping the emerging chatbot policy debate: how lawmakers are defining chatbots and what regulatory approaches are beginning to emerge across states.
Design elements of this resource were generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by FPF.
