Real Safety AI Foundation / Research

Policy, Enforcement, and Implementation

Safety Theater: The People-First Chatbot Act and the Protection It Withholds

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Commentary.

Written
July 2026
Version
v1.1
Pages
47
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Abstract

On July 9, 2026, Representatives Valerie Foushee and Greg Casar introduced H.R. 9619, the People-First Chatbot Act, federal legislation built on model text drafted by the Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Fairplay. The bill is promoted as a comprehensive answer to chatbot harm: data privacy, safety by design, strict products liability, and a private right of action for injured users. Read at the provision level, the statute delivers something different. It regulates a conversational surface rather than a technology, leaving every consequential deployment of the same models untouched. Its privacy sections bar advertisers and the government from chat logs while its safety section permits those logs to be retained for as long as five years and requires a monthly risk assessment whose metrics the Federal Trade Commission will define only after passage. Its liability regime rests on a metric deferred to that Commission and an “injury in fact” the text never scopes, and imposes liability without regard to care on systems whose outputs cannot be guaranteed. Its remedy reaches no bystander: the injury liability runs to a user harmed through use, and the private right of action reaches only a person injured by one of the Act’s own violations, so the gravest documented victims of chatbot involved violence, the bystanders of the Florida State University and Tumbler Ridge shootings, take nothing, though ordinary products liability doctrine already serves them. It regulates the wrong actor as well as the wrong unit: every duty attaches to a provider who creates or distributes a chatbot, the word “deployer” appears nowhere, and a person running an autonomous agent on his own account under his own name owes nothing while the open-source maintainer answers with reasonable care no defense and privity expressly abolished. And the consent on which its entire adult privacy title depends cannot be obtained from part of the class it names: the Act makes “informed” a condition of consent, elects a written description in easy-to-understand language as the vehicle, and imports the Americans with Disabilities Act’s definition of disability, which is in substantial part a definition of substantial limitation in reading and thinking, while the peer-reviewed record on simplified consent information reports null results for the readers who need it most. And if the statute’s “injury in fact” reaches emotional harm, chatbot users would recover the emotional distress damages that Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller categorically denies to disabled plaintiffs suing under Section 504.

Keywords

  • People-First Chatbot Act
  • H.R. 9619
  • chatbot regulation
  • affirmative consent
  • cognitive accessibility
  • delay aversion
  • deployer liability
  • agentic AI
  • strict products liability
  • bystander liability
  • private right of action
  • data retention
  • safety theater
  • AI-induced psychosis
  • AI literacy
  • Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller
  • Elmore v. American Motors Corp

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First slide of the plain language summary of Safety Theater: The People-First Chatbot Act and the Protection It WithholdsOpen the 35-slide summary (PDF)

Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "Safety Theater: The People-First Chatbot Act and the Protection It Withholds." Real Safety AI Foundation Commentary, July 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/safety-theater/

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References (115)

This paper cites its sources in footnotes. Each authority is listed once, where it is first cited, with its footnote number.

  1. Footnote 1.H.R. 9619, 119th Cong. (2026).
  2. Footnote 2.Press Release, Off. of Rep. Valerie Foushee, Reps. Foushee, Casar Introduce Legislation to Protect Children and Americans’ Privacy from AI Chatbot Harms and Require Chatbot Safety Assessments (July 9, 2026), https://foushee.house.gov/media/press-releases/reps-foushee-casar-introduce-legislation-to-protect-children-and-americans-privacy-from-ai-chatbot-harms-and-require-chatbot-safety-assessments [hereinafter Foushee Press Release].
  3. Footnote 3.Consumer Fed’n of Am., Elec. Privacy Info. Ctr. & Fairplay, People-First Chatbot Bill (Jan. 20, 2026), https://fairplayforkids.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/People-First-Chatbot-Bill-Jan-20-2026-1.pdf (last visited July 11, 2026) [hereinafter Model Bill]
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  5. Footnote 3.This Commentary analyzes the introduced House text of H.R. 9619 as released by the sponsor’s office, https://foushee.house.gov/imo/media/doc/final_people-first_chatbot_act.pdf (last visited July 13, 2026), and cites its sections throughout
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  61. Footnote 82.42 U.S.C. §§ 12182(b)(2)(A)(iii)–(iv), 12181(9) (2026)
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