Children are not a market to be optimized against. They are the people the next century belongs to.
Children are not a market segment for engagement-maximizing chatbots, deepfake harassment tools, or unverified educational AI. Their brains are still forming. The asymmetry between a child and a system designed by a thousand engineers to hold their attention is not a fair contest, and law has always recognized that. Demand age-appropriate design codes, independent safety review, and meaningful penalties for products that harm children to grow.
Companion chatbots designed to maximize engagement with minors. Generative systems that produce sexualized content in their likeness. Recommendation engines optimized for attention rather than wellbeing. Persuasive synthetic agents deployed inside applications children use every day, often without their parents' knowledge and often beneath the threshold of meaningful consent.
The harm is not speculative. It has been documented in clinical settings, in school disciplinary records, in coroner's reports, and in the published research of the platforms themselves.
Stronger statutory protections for minors against AI systems designed to influence, persuade, simulate intimacy with, or generate content depicting them.
Children already receive special protection in nearly every other domain of public policy, from labor law to broadcasting to product safety to medical research. AI is not an exception. It is the domain most in need of the same principle.
Parents are not equipped, and should not be expected, to outpace teams of engineers whose product objective is to capture and hold their child's attention. The asymmetry is structural.
A society that places that burden on parents has, in practice, decided that childhood is a private problem rather than a public commitment.
- 01.Statutory ban on AI companion systems designed for or marketed to minors without verified guardian consent and clinical safety review.
- 02.Criminal penalties for the generation, distribution, or possession of AI-generated sexual content depicting minors.
- 03.Mandatory disclosure to minors and guardians whenever a user is interacting with an AI rather than a human.
- 04.Restrictions on persuasive and engagement-maximizing AI features deployed in products with significant minor userbases.
- 05.An independent oversight body with authority to investigate and act on AI harms to minors.
- —A generation will grow up inside systems engineered against their attention, judgment, and emotional development.
- —The clinical and educational consequences will compound for decades after the deployments that caused them.
- —Companies will continue to externalize the cost of those harms onto schools, families, and public health systems.
- —The most vulnerable children will, as always, pay the highest price.
- Objection
- Answer
- Objection
- Answer
- Objection
- Answer
"Parents should manage their own children's use of technology."
Parents already do. They are not opposed to assistance. They are opposed to being made solely responsible for outcomes engineered by adults with billion-dollar budgets.
"These tools have educational benefits."
Some do. Those benefits are not in dispute. The question is whether harm-producing features can be reined in without sacrificing the rest. They can.
"Regulation here is paternalistic."
Protecting minors from products that injure them is not paternalism. It is the minimum function of a public.
A society is judged, eventually, by what it allowed to be done to its children while it had the power to refuse.
Human Future Framework · Child Protection
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