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Received — 29 September 2026 ⏭

EFF to Lawmakers: Ground AI Cybersecurity Rules in Best Practices

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By: Jacob Hoffman-Andrews · Tori Noble · Maddie Daly
18 September 2026 at 03:16

With doomsday AI scenarios dominating the news, lawmakers are rightly concerned about reports concerning security breaches at major US AI labs, such as the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and the many others reported in its aftermath. As they consider potentially regulating frontier AI, they should focus any new legislation on the immediate, demonstrated risks from those incidents. 

Post-incident reports show that the Hugging Face incident could have been mitigated or prevented by following longstanding cybersecurity best practices, like stronger sandboxing and monitoring. Any new legislation should focus on closing gaps in existing law to prevent AI companies from taking unreasonable risks with the public's security.

When an AI developer or deployer runs a test or a task that has a high likelihood of causing harm to third parties—for instance, by breaking into someone else's computers—there should be clear minimum safety requirements. Such tests should run in a properly sandboxed test environment, disconnected from other systems, and be monitored and logged. Following these fundamental best practices would have prevented or substantially mitigated all of the incidents at AI labs that we currently know about.

That said, any proposal must be flexible enough to evolve with changing technology. Minimum safety requirements specific only to current AI technologies are likely to become obsolete; legal standards tied to well-established cybersecurity best practices are far more likely to stand the test of time. Tying any new mandates to evidence-backed security protocols also protects the public without impeding future AI development.

Strong legislation should also mandate and fund independent third-party investigations into any serious security incidents that may occur during AI labs’ tests of new tools, and make reports of these investigations available to the public. This important transparency measure would go a long way toward providing public oversight of the industry.

As with any technology regulation, those targeting cybersecurity practices at AI labs must be careful, precise, and practical.

Received — 13 September 2026 ⏭

The Youth AI Privacy Act’s Privacy Paradox

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By: Maddie Daly
3 August 2026 at 23:08

Update: The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance this bill on August 5, 2026. EFF continues to oppose the bill, which still needs approval from the full Senate. 

The Senate Commerce Committee is poised to consider the Youth AI Privacy Act, a bill that would require AI companies to create kids-only privacy rules and implement so-called “safe design features,” which would—like three other bills under consideration this week—require more data collection and make it harder for people to access lawful speech online. 

While the bill is narrower than some other proposed chatbot bills, it still has massive data security implications because it protects information for only certain users. This creates a problem we’ve cited many times before: if a bill requires that online services offer protections to minor users, the services will respond by imposing age gates to know which users should receive them. A better approach would be to offer the same privacy protections to all users. That way, we would avoid the services having to collect data on everyone to know a users’ age.

This bill also contains a problematic and vague provision that expressly allows AI companies to collect a known minor’s personal data for the purpose of testing, identifying, and addressing "harm to users”—without being clear on what exactly that means. Either way, services will need to collect even more information from young people, who are already targets of data theft and identity fraud. The Youth AI Privacy Act will give young people less privacy, not more. 

The Youth AI Privacy Act does include some positive privacy provisions around prohibiting the processing of personal information, like limiting what companies can do with people’s chat logs, including training, profiling, and disclosing them to other companies for training. But a general privacy bill must set these limits for everyone, not just minors. 

Mandating Design is Regulating Speech

The bill also requires the use of “safe design features,” which would restrict how online services providers design their systems and would deny teenagers the ability to use features like push alerts and notifications.  

We have seen this same type of restriction, sometimes called “age appropriate design code” in several states, including in California, Texas, and Arkansas. Unfortunately, these restrictions run into constitutional problems. In fact, federal courts have largely blocked these laws from going into effect because they likely violate the First Amendment rights of all internet users and the online services they regulate. Specifically, these laws interfere with internet users’ First Amendment rights to either speak or access speech online, and they also violate the rights on online services to decide how they will present information on their sites. 

Similarly, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that “minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection.” This does not mean that parents or guardians can’t set their own rules for their families—they can and they should, based on the needs and circumstances of the individual teenagers. But it does mean that Congress cannot adopt a “one size fits all” regulation that sets a restrictive government default that affects the First Amendment rights of all internet users, including teenagers. 

Received — 11 January 2026 ⏭

Congress's Crusade to Age Gate the Internet: 2025 in Review

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By: Molly Buckley · Maddie Daly
31 December 2025 at 18:35

In the name of 'protecting kids online,' Congress pushed forward legislation this year that could have severely undermined our privacy and stifled free speech. These bills would have mandated invasive age-verification checks for everyone online—adults and kids alike—handing unprecedented control to tech companies and government authorities.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle introduced bill after bill, each one somehow more problematic than the last, and each one a gateway for massive surveillance, internet censorship, and government overreach. In all, Congress considered nearly twenty federal proposals.

For us, this meant a year of playing legislative whack-a-mole, fighting off one bad bill after another. But more importantly, it meant building sustained opposition, strengthening coalitions, and empowering our supporters—that's you!—with the tools you need to understand what's at stake and take action.

Luckily, thanks to this strong opposition, these federal efforts all stalled… for now.

So, before we hang our hats and prepare for the new year, let’s review some of our major wins against federal age-verification legislation in 2025.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)

Of the dozens of federal proposals relating to kids online, the Kids Online Safety Act remains the biggest threat. We, along with a coalition of civil liberties groups, LGBTQ+ advocates, youth organizations, human rights advocates, and privacy experts, have been sounding the alarm on KOSA for years now.

First introduced in 2022, KOSA would allow the Federal Trade Commission to sue apps and websites that don’t take measures to restrict young people’s access to certain content. There have been numerous versions introduced, though all of them share a common core: KOSA is an unconstitutional censorship bill that threatens the speech and privacy rights of all internet users. It would impose a requirement that platforms “exercise reasonable care” to prevent and mitigate a sweeping list of harms to minors, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, bullying, and “compulsive usage.” Those prohibitions are so broad that they will sweep up online speech about the topics, including efforts to provide resources to adults and minors experiencing them. The bill claims prohibit censorship based on “the viewpoint of users,” but that’s simply a smokescreen. Its core function is to let the federal government sue platforms, big or small, that don’t block or restrict content that someone later claims contributed to one of these harms. 

In addition to stifling online speech, KOSA would strongly incentivize age-verification systems—forcing all users, adults and minors, to prove who they are before they can speak or read online. Because KOSA requires online services to separate and censor aspects of their services accessed by children, services are highly likely to demand to know every user’s age to avoid showing minors any of the content KOSA deems harmful. There are a variety of age determination options, but all have serious privacy, accuracy, or security problems. Even worse, age-verification schemes lead everyone to provide even more personal data to the very online services that have invaded our privacy before. And all age verification systems, at their core, burden the rights of adults to read, get information, and speak and browse online anonymously.

Despite what lawmakers claim, KOSA won’t bother big tech—in fact, they endorse it! The bill is written so that big tech companies, like Apple and X, will be able to handle the regulatory burden that KOSA will demand, while smaller platforms will struggle to comply. Under KOSA, a small platform hosting mental health discussion boards will be just as vulnerable as Meta or TikTok—but much less able to defend itself. 

The good news is that KOSA’s momentum this Congress was waning at best. There was a lot of talk about the bill from lawmakers, but little action. The Senate version of the bill, which passed overwhelmingly last summer, did not even make it out of committee this Congress.

In the House, lawmakers could not get on the same page about the bill—so much so that one of the original sponsors of KOSA actually voted against the bill in committee in December.

The bad news is that lawmakers are determined to keep raising this issue, as soon as the beginning of next year. So let’s keep the momentum going by showing them that users do not want age verification mandates—we want privacy.

TAKE ACTION

Don't let congress censor the internet

Threats Beyond KOSA

KOSA wasn’t the only federal bill in 2025 that used “kids’ safety” as a cover for sweeping surveillance and censorship mandates. Concern about possible harms of AI chatbots dominated policy discussion this year in Congress.

One of the most alarming proposals on the issue was the GUARD Act, which would require AI chatbots to verify all users’ ages, prohibit minors from using AI tools, and implement steep criminal penalties for chatbots that promote or solicit certain harms. As we wrote in November, though the GUARD Act may look like a child-safety bill, in practice it’s an age-gating mandate that could be imposed on nearly every public-facing AI chatbot—from customer-service bots to search-engine assistants. The GUARD Act could force countless AI companies to collect sensitive identity data, chill online speech, and block teens from using some of the digital tools that they rely on every day.

Like KOSA, the GUARD Act would make the internet less free, less private, and less safe for everyone. It would further consolidate power and resources in the hands of the bigger AI companies, crush smaller developers, and chill innovation under the threat of massive fines. And it would cut off vulnerable groups’ ability to use helpful everyday AI tools, further fracturing the internet we know and love.

With your help, we urged lawmakers to reject the GUARD Act and focus instead on policies that provide more transparency, options, and comprehensive privacy for all users.

Beating Age Verification for Good

Together, these bills reveal a troubling pattern in Congress this year. Rather than actually protecting young people’s privacy and safety online, Congress continues to push a legislative framework that’s based on some deeply flawed assumptions:

  1. That the internet must be age-gated, with young people either heavily monitored or kicked off entirely, in order to be safe;
  2. That the value of our expressive content to each individual should be determined by the state, not individuals or even families; and
  3. That these censorship and surveillance regimes are worth the loss of all users’ privacy, anonymity, and free expression online.

We’ve written over and over about the many communities who are immeasurably harmed by online age verification mandates. It is also worth remembering who these bills serve—big tech companies, private age verification vendors, AI companies, and legislators vying for the credit of “solving” online safety while undermining users at every turn.

We fought these bills all through 2025, and we’ll continue to do so until we beat age verification for good. So rest up, read up (starting with our all-new resource hub, EFF.org/Age!), and get ready to join us in this fight in 2026. Thank you for your support this year.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

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