On Tuesday, California state senator Steve Padilla will make an appearance with Megan Garcia, the mother of a Florida teen who killed himself following a relationship with an AI companion that Garcia alleges contributed to her son’s death. 

The two will announce a new bill that would force the tech companies behind such AI companions to implement more safeguards to protect children. They’ll join other efforts around the country, including a similar bill from California State Assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan that would ban AI companions for anyone younger than 16 years old, and a bill in New York that would hold tech companies liable for harm caused by chatbots. 

You might think that such AI companionship bots—AI models with distinct “personalities” that can learn about you and act as a friend, lover, cheerleader, or more—appeal only to a fringe few, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

A new research paper aimed at making such companions safer, by authors from Google DeepMind, the Oxford Internet Institute, and others, lays this bare: Character.AI, the platform being sued by Garcia, says it receives 20,000 queries per second, which is about a fifth of the estimated search volume served by Google. Interactions with these companions last four times longer than the average time spent interacting with ChatGPT. One companion site I wrote about, which was hosting sexually charged conversations with bots imitating underage celebrities, told me its active users averaged more than two hours per day conversing with bots, and that most of those users are members of Gen Z. 

The design of these AI characters makes lawmakers’ concern well warranted. The problem: Companions are upending the paradigm that has thus far defined the way social media companies have cultivated our attention and replacing it with something poised to be far more addictive. 

In the social media we’re used to, as the researchers point out, technologies are mostly the mediators and facilitators of human connection. They supercharge our dopamine circuits, sure, but they do so by making us crave approval and attention from real people, delivered via algorithms. With AI companions, we are moving toward a world where people perceive ...