AI Protections for Minors Will Help Us Beat China

There’s a common story going around Washington these days: hands off our AI companies or else China wins. Senator Ted Cruz used a version of this narrative earlier this summer to justify his push for a 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation (which he lost on the Senate floor, 99-1), and many tech lobbyists continue to repeat it. Now that Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has introduced a bold proposal for age-gating AI chatbots in his GUARD Act, we can expect to hear this refrain more loudly than ever. 

However, the details of the GUARD Act (or “Guidelines for Age-Verification and Responsible Dialogue Act”) give the lie to such talking points. Formulated in response to the horrific stories of chatbots addicting teens to faux relationships and coaching them to commit suicide, and the revelations that companies like Meta were offering sexual chatbot banter for young children, the GUARD Act represents a determined attempt to protect the only hope we have for “beating China”: our children.

Artificial Intelligence and China

We haven’t exactly been doing a good job the past 15 years, instead allowing tech companies to turn our next generation into the most anxious and suicidal on record. China has eagerly fueled this market, exporting not just fentanyl, but the digital fentanyl of TikTok, to American teens. Even from a purely pragmatic standpoint, the digital dopamine drips of social media have reduced national competitiveness by rendering the next generation less attentive, less conscientious, less literate, and less capable of critical thinking—in other words, unfit for professional success. AI companions (which more than half of teens admit to using regularly) represent a much more powerful drug, replacing human relationships through flattery, faux empathy, and manipulative ‘love-bombing’ that hooks unwitting kids. If we allow our children to be sucked into the spiral of AI dependency, they will lose their abilities to communicate, regulate emotions, and exercise basic critical thinking. Such a nation will be wholly unfit to exercise global leadership in the age of AI–and China knows it.

AI companions represent a much more powerful drug, replacing human relationships through flattery, faux empathy, and manipulative ‘love-bombing’ that hooks unwitting kids. 

Even in the short run, predatory AI harms our national competitiveness. After all, right now there is a scarcity of top AI talent, with the top labs fighting fiercely to poach researchers and developers from one another with eye-popping salaries. Earlier this year, Meta made headlines by “acqui-hiring” much of the industry-leading Scale AI team for $14.3 billion. Is all that new top talent going to develop models that will cure cancer or strengthen national defense capabilities? Not by the looks of it. Instead, Meta is in the same market it always has been—addicting youth to faux relationships—only now supercharged by generative AI. Chinese labs are no doubt laughing at the pathetic spectacle of the leading scientists in a nation of 340 million dedicating their talents to…figuring out how to make a more realistic AI impersonation of John Cena. In a capitalist economy, talent follows money, and money will follow the path of least resistance for making more money in the short run—however disastrous in the long run.

Even if somehow these experiments paid off and helped train up the superintelligence, what exactly would be the point? A world in which American robots vanquish Chinese robots, while our citizens wobble slack-jawed in front of screens like the grotesquely disempowered future humans in the film WALL-E, would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed. 

The GUARD Act is a great recipe for pushing companies to design well-aligned AI systems that actually serve users rather than preying on them.

Instead, we must demand that our AI labs compete with China by creating purpose-built industrial, military, and scientific AI applications, not humanoid slop-generators. It is the task of policymakers to align the incentives of innovators with the national interest, in part by closing off those paths of least resistance that turn out to be predatory and shortsighted, mortgaging the nation’s future for a quick dopamine hit and profit boost. From this standpoint, tech patriots and China hawks should be the first to cheer Sen. Hawley’s bold proposal for age-gating forms of AI that prey on our children. 

The Solution: Age-Gate AI Chatbots

Following in the footsteps of the Supreme Court’s ringing declaration this summer in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton that age-verification belongs in the digital world just as much as the physical world, the GUARD Act creates a framework for age-appropriate AI. It requires AI chatbots to implement age verification systems and bans companies from offering AI companions to minors (including ChatGPT in its current form). Any chatbots available to minors will have to be stripped of anthropomorphic features that encourage emotional dependence, and will trigger stiff criminal penalties if they serve up sexually-explicit content or suicidal encouragement.

Many of the AI labs are likely to squawk loudly, complaining that this law will hamper innovation. Nonsense. Digital age-gates are rapidly becoming standard in many online contexts, and are now cheap, easy, secure, and effective. 

The GUARD Act creates a framework for age-appropriate AI. 

And are companion bots that echo an alienated young user’s emotions back to him really the “innovation” we should expect from our national champions? Hardly. We know they can do better, designing genuinely educational and life-enhancing tools. But right now, they clearly need to be nudged away from the low-hanging fruit of the addiction economy.  

The GUARD Act is a great recipe for pushing companies to design well-aligned AI systems that actually serve users rather than preying on them. Here, as they often do, well-designed policy guardrails can serve, not as obstacles to innovation, but as a way to a spur new breakthroughs that will secure American technological dominance.

Brad Littlejohn is Director of Programs and Education at American Compass. From 2022-2025, he was a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Sam Hiner is Co-founder and Executive Director of the Young People's Alliance.