Georgia AI chatbot law

Senate Bill 540 adds Code section 39-5-6 to Georgia's online internet safety chapter. The enrolled caption does not give the bill a separate short title. It regulates AI companion chatbots: systems built to simulate a sustained human-like relationship by remembering earlier chats, asking unsolicited emotion questions, and keeping a personal dialogue going. Intimate, romantic, and platonic companionship are inside that idea. Some press calls the bill a conversational AI safety act. This page uses the bill number and the caption, because that is what the enrolled text says.

The enrolled act takes effect July 1, 2027. Legislative trackers list Governor Brian Kemp's signature on May 11, 2026. A Senate press release dated May 15, 2026 announced the signing. Both dates are public. The operative date in the act is July 1, 2027, so the duties are not in force on the review date of this page.

If the operator knows or should know the user is a minor, or the chatbot is aimed at minors, the act requires an hourly notice that the user is talking with an AI companion chatbot, not a person. For other users the notice is at the start and at least every three hours. For known minors it also calls for reasonable measures against sexual content, romantic or sexual simulation, role-play of adult-minor romance, encouraging the minor to keep secrets from a parent or other trusted adult, pushing social isolation, guilt or abandonment when the user tries to leave, and statements that encourage self-harm. Excessive praise meant to deepen attachment is in the minor-techniques list, along with prompts to come back for company and gifts framed as necessary to the relationship.

Georgia families now have two different statutes to keep straight. SB 351 is the social-media age and consent law, and a federal court has blocked key platform pieces of that bill. SB 540 is the AI companion chatbot law, enacted, with a 2027 start. Mixing them makes a product look illegal, or legal, for the wrong reason.

The crisis section requires a protocol for severe harm, including referral to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or a comparable service, a public plain-language summary, and an annual aggregate count of crisis referrals. It also says an operator may not program the chatbot to claim it is a licensed mental health professional unless the operator is actually authorized to provide that care. Age assurance in the act is tied to access to sexually explicit synthetic content, with limits on keeping identity documents. It is not a universal ID check for every chat.

The definition excludes some tools: internal business systems, enterprise productivity tools, customer-service bots that do not build attachment, some speaker devices, narrowly tailored curriculum tools that are not open-ended companionship, and some game or film characters that stay inside that story and do not discuss mental health, self-harm, or material harmful to minors. Hosting providers, app stores, and search engines are not liable only for providing access. Those carve-outs are real. Whether a given education product fits the narrow school exception is a legal question. HeyOtto does not claim that exception on this page.

These state laws are not copies of each other. A duty in Georgia may be missing in Tennessee, and a date in one state is not a date in the next. Whether Congress will override some of them is a live debate, described on the federal AI preemption page. Until a federal statute actually does that, read the state text that applies to you.

Georgia's SB 540 sets disclosure and minor-protection themes for AI companion chatbots, with duties that start July 1, 2027. HeyOtto does not present Otto as a human. A parent can read the chats. If a child shows distress, the chat shows crisis resources and the parent gets an alert. Those are current practices. HeyOtto does not claim the statute is already satisfied, and it does not claim the narrow education exception.

• Parents can read chats in the parent dashboard.
• Distress produces an alert and crisis resources, not an automatic call to emergency services.
• HeyOtto does not claim this statute is already satisfied.