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Briefing: The New AI Child Safety Law - What Legal Teams Need to Do Now

If you're fielding questions about a "new AI child safety law," your stakeholders want clear steps, not legalese. Here's a practical brief you can send to product, policy, and execs in one shot.

Assume the law targets AI systems that interact with minors or process their data. Expect age assurance, risk assessments, transparency, and stronger content safeguards. Build your plan around that core.

Scope: Who's Likely Covered

• Developers and operators of AI systems used by or accessible to minors, including chatbots, recommendation engines, and generative features.
• Platforms offering AI-driven content discovery, ads, or messaging where minors are present or likely to be present.
• Third-party vendors providing age assurance, moderation, analytics, or model services tied to minors' data or experiences.

Key Obligations You Should Expect

• Child-focused risk assessments before deployment and after significant changes; documented mitigations and periodic review.
• Age assurance with clear privacy safeguards; minimize data collection and retention, prefer tokens or attributes over raw identifiers.
• Default-high protections: limited personalization, stricter content filters, location off, profiling off unless strictly necessary.
• Clear notices and in-product disclosures that minors and parents can understand; no dark patterns.
• Human review for sensitive interactions and escalation paths for harm signals (self-harm, grooming, threats, exploitation).
• Incident reporting to the regulator within defined timeframes; audit-ready logs of decisions, training data sources, and safety tests.

Enforcement Mechanics to Plan For

• Regulator and state attorney general authority; civil penalties per user, per day; injunctive relief; consent orders with audits.
• Possible private right of action under state law (check forum); whistleblower channels and safe-harbor frameworks via approved codes.
• Extraterritorial reach if minors in the jurisdiction can access your product; vendor liability via joint responsibility clauses.

How It Intersects With Existing Law

• Children's privacy: consent, notice, and data minimization duties will echo COPPA principles for U.S. services.
• State privacy acts (e.g., CA, CO, CT, UT) add data rights, DPIAs, and dark pattern prohibitions; keep your DPIA library current.
• Biometric and image data: BIPA-level exposure if you infer age or identity from audio, video, or images.
• Online safety regimes abroad (e.g., age-appropriate design codes, platform safety duties) may set the bar higher than domestic rules.

FTC COPPA FAQ and UK Children's Code are useful benchmarks for safeguards and governance.

Litigation and Liability Themes You'll See

• UDAP theories for misleading safety claims, weak age checks, or unsafe defaults.
• Product liability/design defect arguments if AI features predictably expose minors to grooming, unsafe challenges, or self-harm prompts.
• Duty to warn and duty to design safer defaults; failure to moderate at scale where warning signs are known.
• Contract claims from enterprise customers if SLAs, audit rights, or child-safety warranties fail under stress.

30-Day Action Plan for Counsel

• Map exposure: list every AI feature that minors can touch (or that can touch minors' data). Identify decision points and data flows.
• Run a rapid DPIA focused on child risks; capture mitigations, owners, and deadlines. Schedule quarterly updates.
• Stand up an age assurance approach with a privacy-first design; store proofs, not raw IDs, where feasible.
• Flip defaults: no ad personalization for minors, location off, stricter limits on DMs, image generation, and live features.
• Refresh notices and parent dashboards; add clear reporting and appeal flows a teenager can use.
• Lock vendor risk: amend DPAs for minors' data, add audit rights, incident timelines, indemnities, and pass-down obligations.
• Create an evidence trail: model cards, safety test results, incident drills, and policy enforcement stats.
• Brief execs monthly with KPIs: under-13 access rate, harmful-content hit rate, time-to-action, and repeat incident counts.

Contract Language to Add Now

• Child-safety representations and warranties; explicit scope of age assurance and moderation services.
• Data minimization and purpose limits for minors; retention schedule; ban on secondary use and model training without approval.
• Independent audit and evidence production on request; cooperation with regulators.
• Tiered indemnities for regulatory fines tied to vendor faults; escalation and cure timelines.

Operational Guardrails for Product Teams

• Blocklists and classifiers targeting grooming, sexual content, self-harm, hate, and violent challenges; frequent re-tuning.
• Rate limits, time-of-day limits, and conversational boundaries for minors; cap sensitive generations.
• Human-in-the-loop review for escalations; trained responders with playbooks and warm handoffs to crisis lines where appropriate.
• Shadow deployments and red-teaming to test bypasses of age checks and safety filters before broad release.

Questions to Ask at Your Next Product Review

• What's the most likely way a minor could get hurt here? Show the evidence and the fix.
• How do we know our age checks work across devices, VPNs, and shared accounts?
• What data do we truly need from minors, and for how long? What's the deletion trigger?
• Which vendors can access minors' data, and can they train on it? Where is that banned in the contract?
• What is our 72-hour incident plan and who signs the regulator notice?

What to Watch Next

• Rulemaking timelines and technical standards that define "reasonable" age assurance and moderation.
• Enforcement coalitions among AGs and data protection authorities; early consent orders will set the template.
• Age verification technologies that reduce data collection risk (tokenization, zero-knowledge proofs).
• Cross-border conflicts on speech, safety duties, and data localization impacting global rollouts.

Bottom Line

Treat child safety for AI as a product requirement with legal guardrails, not a last-mile compliance task. If you can show thoughtful risk assessment, safer defaults, strong logs, and vendor control, you'll be ready for both regulators and plaintiffs' lawyers.