FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, June 3, 2026
Contact: [email protected]
919-538-2809

RALEIGH - A federal bill marketed as children's online safety legislation would tell tech companies they have no legal duty to protect kids, drop any requirement to verify users' ages, and override the stronger state laws already on the books.

Attorney General Jeff Jackson and a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general are telling Congress not to pass it.

"This bill says tech platforms have no legal duty to protect children," said Attorney General Jeff Jackson. "We already have laws in North Carolina that hold tech companies accountable for harming kids, and this bill would wipe them out and replace them with almost nothing."

Jackson and 43 other attorneys general sent a letter to Congressional leaders warning that the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, H.R. 7757, would weaken existing state internet safety laws, shield Big Tech from accountability, and fail to deliver real protections for minors.

The KIDS Act would preempt state laws addressing online harms to children, covering social media, obscenity, online gaming platforms, and AI chatbots. The bill appears to let state attorneys general enforce its terms, but it reserves federal preemption and intervention in every one of those cases. The state role is on paper only.

It gets weaker where it should get stronger. The section titled "Kids Online Safety" explicitly states that platforms have no legal responsibility to protect children. A separate section says platforms are not required to verify users' ages.

The bill's AI provisions also carve out chat functions that are "incidental" to a platform's primary purpose. In practice, that means even widely used chatbots escape scrutiny as long as they're attached to a larger platform. And the bill would permit companies to conduct market and product research on minors.

Attorney General Jackson has repeatedly pushed tech companies to do better for children. In August, he demanded that tech companies protect kids from predatory artificial intelligence products and demanded that search engines, banks, and payment platforms take stronger steps against deepfake nonconsensual intimate imagery. Earlier that month, he demanded that Instagram change its location-sharing feature to protect kids from predators. Additionally, the North Carolina Department of Justice has ongoing lawsuits against Meta and TikTok over alleged harms to minors. Attorney General Jackson and Utah Attorney General Derek Brown have also formed a bipartisan AI task force focused in part on developing safeguards that AI developers should follow to protect the public, especially children.

Attorney General Jackson is joined in sending the letter to Congressional leadership by the attorneys general of Connecticut, Hawaii, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Northern Mariana Islands, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

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