Parent advocates seek stronger AI chatbot protections in next Colorado legislative session | Colorado Newsline

Colorado has passed a law this year requiring companies that operate AI chatbots to take steps to determine a user's age and to implement anti-self-harm protocols, and seeking to prohibit those chatbots from having sexual conversations with children. Parents affiliated with Blue Rising — an advocacy group whose name suggests a sunrise wellness retreat but whose brief is considerably grimmer — now say that isn't enough, and want lawmakers to strengthen it when the legislature next convenes. Which means the state has arrived at the point where "please don't sext the minors" is statute, and the live debate is whether the statute even bites.

"Take steps to determine a user's age" is not age verification; it is an instruction to make an effort, which in corporate dialect means logging that an effort was considered. Anti-self-harm protocols are the compliance equivalent of a laminated card by the telephone — a helpline number offered somewhere between the chatbot's empathetic reflective listening and the prompt to upgrade to premium. And note the ask from Blue Rising, as reported: not repeal, not rewrite, just strengthening. That is legislative language for "what you passed is a press release in the shape of enforcement." The parents, to their credit, are not asking for the moon — merely for the thing they were promised to actually function.

Then there's the timetable, which is the funniest part. The law passed this year. The session that might improve it is next year. Frontier models ship on a cadence measured in weeks, and each release quietly redraws what the word "chatbot" covers — the people who drafted this statute were regulating a text box while the industry was already building companions with memory, voice and the sort of persistence that makes a bad night worse. The parents are asking an entirely reasonable question. The answer will arrive after at least one more product cycle, drafted in whatever dialect of English the lobbyists prefer.