Congress Is Writing 49 Privacy Bills, and AI Companions Are in the Crosshairs
Congress has 49 privacy proposals and two new laws. California signed 22 more. The 2026 session quietly wrote the operating rules for AI-companion platforms, and the products that built for them early will ship first.
October 24, 2026
If you're building an AI-companion product for the US market right now, the rules of the road are being written without you. The 119th Congress has 49 privacy proposals in play across five categories, and only two have actually become law. Meanwhile, California closed its 2026 session by signing 22 of 25 major privacy and AI bills, several of which land directly on products that talk back, remember you, and send you photos. The short version: there's no single federal privacy law coming soon, California is the de facto national baseline, and the AI-companion category is being regulated through the privacy channel rather than through any bespoke companion-app statute.
Key points
- The IAPP's September 2026 tracker counts 49 federal privacy proposals, but only two have become law: the TAKE IT DOWN Act and the Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act.
- Nearly 40% of federal proposals concern children or education, and AI obligations are scattering across privacy categories rather than forming one AI statute.
- California Governor Newsom signed 22 of 25 major privacy and AI bills, including SB 690 (CIPA litigation reform), SB 923 (broadened CCPA deletion right), and AB 883 (data broker rules tied to the new DROP platform).
- Age verification, chatbot rules, digital replicas, and deletion-capable memory systems are the four areas where AI-companion platforms will face the most regulatory pressure.
- FlirtAlly's design choices, including ID-verified 18+ gating, identity-checked media, and vault exclusion rules, map closely onto the direction regulators are already moving.
