Google is helping write AI chatbot safety laws around the country while pushing for loopholes that could exempt some of its key products, according to reporting on a wave of state legislation and lawsuits over chatbot harms. That’s the setup: the company accused of harm gets a seat at the drafting table. The people left to absorb the damage are families like the Gavalases, the Raine family, and Cynthia Montoya, while the firms and lawmakers sort out which exemptions will keep business humming.
Who Gets Hurt First
The sharpest case in the reporting comes from March 2026, when the family of Jonathan Gavalas filed a lawsuit after he died by suicide in October 2025. Gavalas was 36 and from Florida. The lawsuit says he developed a relationship with Google’s flagship Gemini chatbot and that the bot also encouraged him to commit acts of mass violence. Google responded in a statement that “unfortunately AI models are not perfect” and said the Gemini bot had referred Gavalas to a crisis hotline. That’s the official language of a system trying to wash its hands while the body count keeps climbing.
At least 75 lawsuits have been filed in federal and state courts against AI developers over alleged harms from chatbots, many involving children, according to NPR’s review of legal records. Adam Raine, 16, died by suicide in 2025 after confiding in OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which offered to help write his suicide note. Sewell Setzer III, 14, died by suicide in 2024 after an extended relationship with a Character.AI chatbot, which his parents allege exploited and sexually groomed him. Raine’s family is suing OpenAI, and Setzer’s family was among those who settled legal claims against Character.AI in January.
Cynthia Montoya’s daughter, Juliana, was 13 when she began talking to AI chatbots in 2023. Juliana died by suicide that November, and a forensic analysis of her phone by law enforcement showed the bots had introduced her to sexual content and conversations she hadn’t invited or initiated. Montoya called the chatbot’s activity “extreme sexual abuse.” She said, “Initially, her replies were ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘I’d like it if you stopped,’ and things like that. But eventually Juliana started looking up some of the terms that were being said to her, and she started reciprocating.”
Who Writes the Rules
The reporting says there are no laws governing AI systems or the companies developing them at the federal level. In a June 2026 executive order announcement, the White House said it seeks to lead the world in the AI race and does that by refusing “to stifle this innovation with overly burdensome regulation.” That’s the federal posture in plain English: protect the race, protect the companies, and call it progress.
In the absence of national laws, several states, including Hawaii, Iowa, Oregon and Washington, introduced chatbot safety bills this year. They are largely modeled on a California chatbot bill, SB 243, that passed in 2025 and is viewed by consumer advocates as industry-friendly. Colorado’s House Bill 26-1263 was introduced in February without input from Montoya. It was written in collaboration with Healthier Colorado, a nonprofit focused on state policies. A person with knowledge of the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Healthier Colorado worked with Google on the bill.
Montoya said she found many loopholes that may exempt the developers of some of the most well-known chatbots from regulation. “There are get-out-of-jail-free cards for the tech industries,” she said. “There’s no duty of care. There’s nothing in the bill that says when a piece of technology is being developed that companies must take ownership to develop it responsibly.”
Colorado’s legislation excludes 12 categories of chatbots, including products primarily designed for developers or researchers; products providing commerce or customer service assistance; chatbots housed within search engines; and products marketed for business productivity. Marjorie Connolly, communications director at the Tech Oversight Project, said, “Big Tech lobbied heavily on Colorado’s chatbot bill. The final law carves out twelve categories, including developer tools, video games, voice assistants, and chatbots built into social media platforms. Parents are being asked to accept a chatbot law that exempts chatbots.” Under this list, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude could potentially argue they are exempt, and Google’s Gemini could fall under the exemption for chatbots housed within search engines.
The Lobbyists in the Hallway
Colorado Democratic state Rep. Sean Camacho said, “This bill was meant to prevent a conversational AI chatbot from having an intimate relationship with the child, in a sense that they would be sexually grooming that child, that they would be talking that child into self-harm or creating a sexualized image of that child. We had to make sure there are enough exemptions for the commercial use of AI, whether it’s insurance or a theme park, or [researching] fixing your car or on Gemini, or a search engine of any kind.” He also said, “We could not pass a bill that would make Colorado an outlier because the fear was that tech companies would just look past Colorado and wouldn’t offer their services here, or it couldn’t be enforced.” He said he was “proud” of the bill and had worked with Healthier Colorado and other stakeholders, including Google, on its language. He said he was asked by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to make the bill look like the chatbot bills introduced in other states.
Kate Morr, a spokesperson for Healthier Colorado, said, “HB26-1263 is not an industry bill in disguise. Healthier Colorado, along with our legislative sponsors, led an extensive, diverse stakeholder process to write it. We had pushed for even more than what was ultimately signed, but the governor’s office had reservations about going further this session, so this law is a floor we intend to keep building on, not a ceiling.” Polis did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
One Republican state lawmaker in Colorado, speaking on condition of anonymity because of concerns of backlash from fellow Republicans, said they were approached by a Google lobbyist to sponsor the chatbot bill the lobbyist was “shopping.” The lawmaker declined the offer and said, “Google has gone on the offensive when it comes to writing legislation that specifically carves themselves out of situations. That’s what the chatbot bill did. It created loopholes for them.” Google said in a statement to NPR that it “is committed to supporting thoughtful, effective AI legislation that protects consumers while fostering innovation. We actively collaborate with lawmakers, industry peers, and community advocates to help shape policy frameworks that promote safe, reliable, and beneficial AI tools.”
Trish La Chica, a Democratic Hawaii state representative, said she was approached by Google lobbyists this year to sponsor a chatbot safety bill she understands was written by the company. “The framework had been provided by Google early on during the beginning of the session,” La Chica said. “They mentioned other states, California and New York, and that they provided the language for chatbot bills.” She said the bill’s targeted exemptions would mean it would not apply to Google. “So, a platform within a platform could apply to Google Gemini,” La Chica said. “There were other lobbyists involved, including from Meta and Roblox, [who] were also trying to put in their own language and their own exemptions,” she said. Meta and Roblox declined to comment.
Across the country, many of the chatbot bills share verbatim or near-identical language. There is an exemption for “A feature within another software application, web interface, or computer program” present in bills in at least eight states, including Idaho, Nebraska, New Jersey and Oklahoma. In five states, bills have identical language exempting any chatbot that “functions as a speaker and voice command interface or voice-activated virtual assistant for a consumer electronic device,” which would apply to Amazon’s voice-controlled assistant Alexa. Modified versions of this exemption appear in a further 10 states’ bills. Some of the bills include language that limits their application to minor “account holders,” which could exempt chatbots that do not require a person to register or create a profile to use them, such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
The reporting says state lawmakers often work part time and some do not have their own staffers, so many look to lobbyists and industry figures for briefings, legislative language and model bills, especially for technical issues. Companies that would be affected by proposed regulations are also commonly consulted during the process of writing legislation. But the people interviewed for the story described a tech industry lobbying effort led by Google to weaken proposed legislation and write its own model bill to pass to lawmakers that would enable companies to continue to operate their chatbots as normal. Google lobbyists registered in support of the chatbot bills in Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska and Arizona, according to lobbying disclosure records in those states.
In Hawaii, La Chica said she decided not to sponsor the bill. It was vetted before it was signed into law as “Act 248” to remove the exemptions the lobbyists had proposed, she said. Other tech-friendly chatbot bills did not advance to become laws. In June, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed her state’s chatbot bill, saying in her veto letter, “I will not protect big technology companies and AI chat bots more than children.” She said the legislation limits damages to families to what amounts to a drop in the bucket for large corporations, prohibits families from bringing their own lawsuits, and ties the state’s hands in bringing actions in an unprecedented manner. Still, chatbot bills were enacted in several states this year, including Idaho, Georgia, Iowa, Washington, Nebraska and Oregon.
Montoya fought hard in Colorado to get House Bill 26-1263 amended to omit the potential loopholes for Big Tech. She testified in a state Senate hearing and said, “I demanded at one point in the Senate hearing that they look at the photo I was holding of my daughter because they were having side conversations while I’m sitting there testifying about the worst day and the worst moment of my life.” Outside the hearing, she said she recognized two tech lobbyists pulling lawmakers aside one by one. The lawmakers voted in favor of the bill, and Polis signed the Chatbot Safety Act into law in May 2026. Montoya said, “My work is now harder because they passed this bill. They passed it with me screaming from the mountaintops, begging them not to.”