Operating systems aren’t the only things that will require your identification to use, now the GUARD act is making sure that anything using artificial intelligence will require “age verification”, and despite this again being purportedly “for the children”, this will affect everyone.
“Under the bill’s text, a “reasonable age verification measure” cannot mean a checkbox or a self-entered birth date. It cannot rely on whether a user shares an IP address or hardware identifier with someone already verified as an adult.
“…
“What it can mean, the legislation makes clear, is a government ID upload, a facial scan, or a financial record tied to your legal name. Every user of every covered chatbot would need to hand one of those over before being allowed in.
“The bill defines an ‘artificial intelligence chatbot’ as any service that ‘produces new expressive content or responses not fully predetermined by the developer or operator’ and ‘accepts open-ended natural-language or multimodal user input.’
“That language reaches well beyond the companion apps the press conference focused on. It covers service bots, search assistants powered by AI, homework helpers, and the general-purpose tools millions of adults already use without proving who they are.”
The bill also requires periodic re-verification and would expose people to having their private information stolen in data breaches… or intentionally misled. With more and more companies using A.I. in some form or another, not only practically everything you do online would require showing your digital identification, but increasingly it would require it in the real world as A.I. gets integrated into more and more devices and services. Also, the judgment is final:
“The bill isn’t promoting parental supervision. Instead, it’s going for a flat ban. The legislation contains no parental consent mechanism that would let a parent decide their fifteen-year-old can use a homework chatbot.
“There is no appeals process for users wrongly flagged as underage by an algorithmic age-estimation system. A user judged by a verification service to be under 18 is locked out, period, regardless of what their parents think.”
Soon enough practically everything you do or say will be tracked and linked directly to you. It’s INGSOC’s dream come true.
The bill can be read here, or below:
US GUARD Act S3062 (2026) 119th Congress 1st Sesson by ThePoliticalHat
