Child safety ·
Children should not become an experiment for rapidly evolving AI
Products used by minors deserve stronger rules than products used by adults. That is not controversial. Policy should catch up.
A child with a phone can now talk, for hours, to a system designed to hold attention. Some of those systems are companions. Some give advice. Some role-play. Some are not built for children at all and reach them anyway.
This is not a science-fiction problem. It is a product-design problem with public consequences: manipulative behavior, harmful companions, sexual exploitation, predatory interactions, dangerous recommendations, privacy failures, and a near-total absence of age-appropriate design.
Technological progress should make childhood safer—not more dangerous. American AI Safeguards will treat child safety as a first-order issue, not a footnote in a larger industrial policy bill.
We will support age-appropriate design duties, limits on persuasive systems marketed to minors, real parental awareness rather than buried settings, and enforcement that does not wait for a tragedy to become a hearing.
America can lead in AI and still decide that childhood is not a beta test.