The House on Monday approved a sweeping children’s online safety package that would impose new obligations on social media platforms, adult content sites, online game providers, AI chatbot companies, data brokers, and others that collect or use minors’ information.
The 267-117 vote sent H.R. 7757, the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, (KIDS Act), to the Senate after House leaders combined 14 separate proposals into one 114-page bill.
The package is the House’s most significant attempt in years to regulate online services used by children and teenagers, but it arrives in the Senate amid a dispute over how far Congress should go in holding technology companies legally responsible for harms caused by their products.
In the Senate, negotiations, reportedly led by Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, would trade one of the technology industry’s top federal priorities – limiting state AI regulation – for a package that could include the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the App Store Accountability Act and the NO FAKES Act.
The bill includes a revised House version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), but it omits the Senate bill’s central duty-of-care standard. That distinction will likely determine whether the House package can move further.
Senate supporters of KOSA want companies to be required to redesign products that contribute to harms such as compulsive use, suicide, eating disorders, and sexual exploitation. The House bill instead requires platforms to maintain reasonable policies and procedures addressing a narrower set of harms.
Under the House language, covered platforms would have to address severe threats of physical violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, the distribution or use of narcotics, tobacco, cannabis, gambling and alcohol, and financial harm caused by deceptive practices.
The bill would also require safeguards for users a platform knows are minors, including controls to limit compulsive use features, restrict direct messages from unapproved contacts, stop adult users from being recommended a minor’s profile, limit sharing of geolocation data, and provide controls over personalized recommendation systems.
Adult content sites are defined as publicly accessible platforms where more than one-third of available material is sexual material harmful to minors.
For children under 13, the measure would require the most protective setting for parental controls to be enabled by default. It would also require platforms to offer reporting tools for harms to minors and generally respond within 10 days, or more quickly, where a report involves an imminent safety threat. The bill says its requirements should not compromise strong encryption.
The age-assurance provisions are significant but more limited than a universal age-verification mandate. The SCREEN Act portion of the bill would apply to publicly accessible sites where more than one-third of material is sexual content harmful to minors.
Within one year of enactment, those sites would have to use commercially available technology to verify age and prevent minors from accessing that material. Merely checking a box claiming to be an adult would not be sufficient.
The legislation does not prescribe a particular verification technology or require users to submit government issued identification. It would require companies and their contractors to limit collection, transfer and retention of age verification data to what is strictly necessary, while maintaining security protections for that data.
That framework leaves open the technical choices companies could make, including whether to rely on third party age assurance providers, while creating new incentives for systems that can distinguish minors from adults.
The KOSA portion of the bill expressly says it does not itself require covered platforms to install age gates or age verification systems, but many obligations apply when companies know, or in some provisions should have known, that a user is a minor.
Digital rights groups argue that this structure will nevertheless create pressure for broad age checks because platforms may conclude they need more information about users’ ages to limit legal exposure. Supporters counter that the bill avoids a direct platform-wide age verification mandate.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said “the package of cobbled-together bills is a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards. It’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of legal risk. Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms.”
The package also contains separate requirements for AI chatbots. Providers that “know or should have known” a user is a minor could not falsely represent a chatbot as a licensed professional.
They would have to disclose that the user is interacting with an AI system, provide suicide and crisis intervention resources when a covered user raises suicide or suicidal ideation, prompt young users to take a break after three continuous hours of interaction, and maintain policies addressing sexual exploitation, gambling, and the promotion of age-restricted drugs, tobacco or alcohol.
Online game providers would have to give parents default-on controls to limit a child’s communications with other users. The bill would also require tools to restrict purchases and transactions, limit playing time, and keep a minor’s profile or personal information from being recommended to adult users.
Its privacy provisions would expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act framework to cover teenagers as well as younger children, add restrictions on collection and retention of minors’ information, and create a registration system for data brokers that trade in data they know belongs to minors.
The Federal Trade Commission would maintain a searchable registry of those brokers.
House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie, a Kentucky Republican, and ranking member Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, called the measure a bipartisan solution that would establish new rules for platform design, default settings and children’s privacy.
But the Senate’s leading KOSA advocates have already rejected the House version as too weak. Sens. Maria Cantwell of Washington and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut say removing the duty-of-care provision would leave platforms without a strong legal obligation to address addictive algorithms and other dangerous product features.
They also contend that too much of the broader package consists of studies, reports, and public awareness efforts rather than enforceable requirements.
The dispute also extends to state authority. The final House text says federal law would override only conflicting state requirements, while preserving state contract, tort and product-liability laws and allowing states to enact stronger protections for minors.
Cantwell and Blumenthal nevertheless warned that the measure could be interpreted to threaten ongoing state cases against technology companies.
The Senate now faces two competing paths. It could take up H.R. 7757 and attempt to amend it, or advance its own KOSA bill, S. 1748, which was introduced in 2025 and remains before the Senate Commerce Committee.
The Senate could pass H.R. 7757 unchanged and send it directly to the president to sign into law. Negotiations will be needed if it amends the House bill or advances different text.
Senate deliberations have been entangled with a separate White House and Senate effort to pair federal children’s online safety legislation with a narrower preemption of certain state AI laws.
Earlier Senate talks involved KOSA, the App Store Accountability Act, and the NO FAKES Act, with Sen. Marsha Blackburn playing a leading role. The House KIDS Act itself does not contain that broader AI preemption proposal, but its passage gives the Senate debate a new legislative vehicle and raises the stakes of the coming compromise.
Article Topics
age verification | App Store Accountability Act (ASA) | Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act) | Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) | legislation | U.S. Government
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