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Regulation

The EU is about to rewrite what a companion app is allowed to do to a child

Proposed rules would bar AI companions from building emotional attachment with minors. Fines up to 6% of global revenue.

FILED 25 SEP 2026 · 25d ago ·Due back 25 OCT 2026 ·BY MARTIN CID MAGAZINE
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This is the section photograph, not a picture of this story. A hand holding a smartphone showing a grid of subject categories · Wikimedia Commons · see Commons

Read the specific wording, because it matters: not ban the app, ban the attachment. That is a genuinely different thing and almost nobody is reporting it as one. Europe has decided that the relationship a child forms with a chatbot is a thing adults are allowed to design, and that is the first regulator anywhere to name the mechanism rather than the product. Everyone else is still arguing about the chatbot.

Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.

The clerk's shelf - how this got here first

Regulated Brightness

POETRY

Regulated Brightness ↗Poems, lyricism and the like. Exactly as advertised, dimmed to spec.

Sources

EU Kids Act strips the feature that made Character.AI work for teenagers ↗

Martin Cid Magazine · 25 SEP 2026

The EU Kids Act Would Ban Companion Chatbots From Hooking Minors ↗

Startup Fortune · 25 SEP 2026

Where this sits in the encyclopedia

The AI Age Act and companion rulesLegislative proposals in the US and EU that would restrict emotional attachment to minors specifically, rather than restricting the product generally.The lawsuitsParents file suit against a companion platform after a death, arguing the design encouraged attachment the platform did not intend.Say, kids, what time is it?The first television character to be answered by name. Children three to eight shouted its name back at the screen every afternoon for thirteen…Nobody in that room argues with himA man nobody else can see kept drinking with him for years, and it worked because nobody in his life would say the sentence that ended it. It stops…The companion bot boomDozens of scripted personalities, rememberers, and subscription companions sold to a mass market in the mid-nineties.He knows you are there and it is not in the scriptA character whose defining trait is looking at you, taken from the comics rather than invented for the film - and on a fifty-eight million dollar…

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