On August 31, 2026, in the final hours of California’s two-year session, the Senate concurred in Assembly amendments to SB 1119 by a vote of 39 to 0 and ordered the bill to engrossing and enrolling, sending it to Governor Newsom. Authored by Senator Padilla with Assemblymembers Bauer-Kahan and Wicks, the bill is known as Adam’s Law after Adam Raine, the California teenager whose death is the subject of a wrongful death suit against OpenAI. It amends Section 22602 of and adds Chapter 22.6.1 to Division 8 of the Business and Professions Code.
The bill puts an affirmative duty on any operator that makes a companion chatbot available to a user in California: the chatbot must not pose an unreasonable risk of a covered harm to a minor. That duty is operationalised through pre-deployment risk assessments, crisis response protocols for suicide and self-harm content, design measures barring sexual content, romantic expression, and encouragement of self-harm toward minors, default settings that constrain persistent memory, push notifications, and session and daily time limits, independent child safety audits, and a published child safety policy. Services used exclusively by educational institutions or accessible only through an employer are exempt. Enforcement runs on two tracks: public prosecutors may seek up to 5,000 dollars per child for a negligent violation and up to 15,000 dollars for an intentional one, plus injunctive relief and fees, and a child or parent has a private right of action for actual and punitive damages once specified harm thresholds are met.
The compliance dates are staged. Most of the child protection requirements become operative on July 1, 2027, the Attorney General must stand up complaint mechanisms by January 1, 2028, and the first child safety audits are due by January 1, 2029 or on first public availability, whichever is later. SB 1119 was one of roughly 30 AI bills the legislature sent to the Governor as the session closed; he has until September 30, 2026 to sign or veto. For anyone shipping a conversational product that a minor can reach, this is the most detailed operational rulebook any US state has written, and the design-default requirements will not be satisfiable by a terms-of-service change alone.