Colorado Senate approves bill regulating AI chatbots

Nick Coltrain, The Denver Post on May 11, 2026

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DENVER — A bill that would regulate AI-powered chatbots cleared the Colorado Senate on Monday, while the legislation faces renewed calls for a veto from a mother whose daughter died by suicide following sexual grooming by one of the chatbots.

House Bill 1263 would require chatbots to announce to users regularly that they operate on artificial intelligence. Their developers also must implement measures to prevent emotional dependence and to refer users to a crisis services provider if the user exhibits any suicidal ideation. The bill passed the Senate 24-11 with bipartisan support and opposition.

The original version required companies to try to prevent artificial intelligence bots from producing sexually explicit content. Sen. Kyle Mullica, a Thornton Democrat, sought to toughen that language by requiring chatbots to shut down any conversation that veered in that direction; that also would apply if the bot’s programming led it to produce that content without being directly spurred by the user. That amendment passed.

Mullica invoked the death of Juliana Peralta, a 13-year-old girl whose mother still live in his district. Cynthia Montoya, Peralta’s mother, said her daughter was sexually groomed by a chatbot and the AI agent did nothing when Peralta shared suicidal thoughts with it.

Peralta died in November 2023. Montoya has fought the bill on the grounds it does not go far enough.

In a statement sent late Sunday, Montoya said she still opposed the bill. The measure would set the standard of “technically feasible” for implementing new protections — which Montoya contends would give tech companies too much power in determining if they needed to implement the protections or not.

If tech companies “cannot prevent their products from exploiting children, they need to keep them off the shelves — it’s that simple,” Montoya said in the statement. The bill, including the new amendment, will just codify “widely gaping loopholes,” she said.

“The language is again very loose, and tech companies will likely use the same loopholes to continue their sexual abuse of children,” Montoya said. “When tech is allowed to make the laws, as they undoubtedly did behind the scenes on 1263, our children pay the price.”

Montoya called on Gov. Jared Polis to veto the bill, which still needs to return to the House for concurrence on amendments run in the Senate. Mullica said he was sorry that Montoya felt that way. He noted that he voted for a separate amendment that would have addressed Montoya’s concerns about the “technically feasible” language, but that amendment failed.

Mullica said he didn’t want to let that be the end of trying to shut down sexual exploitation by the AI bots.

“There’s more work to be done, obviously, but I don’t think that we just sit idly by and allow the sexual exploitation of children to happen,” Mullica said.

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