Generates text with AI, in the United States

15 U.S.C. Section 45 · Read the law's page

• Do not engage in unfair or deceptive practices when collecting, using, or sharing personal data.
• Assess foreseeable privacy harms before deploying a system that collects or uses biometric identifiers derived from photographs, videos, or voice recordings, and disclose material facts about that collection.

15 U.S.C. 1052(a) · Read the law's page

• Do not expect to register on the principal register a name, logo, or other mark that consists of or comprises matter which may falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols (s. 1052(a)); this is a ground for refusing registration, not a rule against using the mark.

17 U.S.C. § 102 · Read the law's page

• Treat an original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression, in one of the listed categories such as literary works, as protected by copyright (s. 102(a)).
• Do not assume that copyright in a computer program protects an idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery it embodies, in whatever form it is described, explained, illustrated or embodied (s. 102(b)).
• Read section 102(b) for a computer program as the House report does: the expression the programmer adopted is the copyrightable element, and the actual processes or methods the program embodies are outside the scope of the copyright law.

17 U.S.C. §§ 105, 302 and 511 · Read the law's page

• Do not assume you need the Government's permission to reproduce a work of the United States Government: copyright protection under title 17 is not available for it (s. 105(a)).
• Get permission from the owner before you reproduce a copyright that the United States Government holds by transfer, whether by assignment, bequest, or otherwise (s. 105(a)).
• Treat the covered author, not the Government, as the owner of the copyright in a literary work produced by a civilian faculty member of a covered institution in the course of employment there for publication by a scholarly press or journal (s. 105(b), (d)).
• Count a work created on or after January 1, 1978 as protected for the life of the author and 70 years after the author's death, and a joint work not made for hire for the life of the last surviving author and 70 years after that author's death (s. 302(a), (b)).
• Count an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire as protected for 95 years from the year of its first publication or 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first (s. 302(c)).
• Do not rely on section 511(a) to sue a State or State instrumentality for infringement: the Supreme Court held that Congress lacked authority to abrogate the States' immunity from copyright infringement suits in the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act (Allen v. Cooper (2020)).

17 U.S.C. §§ 106 and 501 · Read the law's page

• Get the copyright owner's permission before you reproduce a copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords, prepare a derivative work based on it, or distribute copies or phonorecords of it to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending, unless sections 107 through 122 allow the use (s. 106(1) to (3)).
• Get the copyright owner's permission before you publicly perform or publicly display a work of a kind clauses (4) and (5) of section 106 name, or publicly perform a sound recording by means of a digital audio transmission, unless sections 107 through 122 allow the use (s. 106(4) to (6)).
• Treat transmitting or otherwise communicating a performance or display of a work to the public by any device or process as performing or displaying it publicly, whether the recipients receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times (s. 101).
• Do not violate any of the exclusive rights provided by sections 106 through 122, or import copies or phonorecords into the United States in violation of section 602: anyone who does is an infringer, including a State, a State instrumentality, and a State officer or employee acting in an official capacity (s. 501(a)).
• Do not induce or encourage users to infringe, and do not profit from their infringement while declining to exercise a right to stop or limit it: the Supreme Court describes the first as contributory infringement and the second as vicarious infringement (MGM Studios v. Grokster, 545 U.S. 913 (2005)).

17 U.S.C. §§ 109 and 117 · Read the law's page

• You may sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of a particular copy or phonorecord you own that was lawfully made under title 17 without the copyright owner's authority; this does not extend, unless the copyright owner authorizes it, to a person who acquired possession from the copyright owner by rental, lease, loan or otherwise without acquiring ownership of it (s. 109(a) and (d)).
• Do not dispose of the possession of a copy of a computer program by rental, lease or lending, or by any act in the nature of rental, lease or lending, for direct or indirect commercial advantage unless the owner of copyright in the program authorizes it (s. 109(b)(1)(A)).
• That rental limit does not reach a program embodied in a machine or product that cannot be copied during its ordinary operation or use, a program in a limited purpose computer designed for playing video games, or lending for nonprofit purposes by a nonprofit library that affixes the prescribed copyright warning to each copy (s. 109(b)(1)(B) and (2)(A)).
• You may make another copy or adaptation of a computer program you own a copy of, without infringing, only as an essential step in using the program with a machine and for no other use, or for archival purposes only, and you must destroy all archival copies if continued possession of the program ceases to be rightful (s. 117(a)).
• Transfer exact copies made under section 117 only along with the copy they were made from and only as part of the transfer of all rights in the program, and transfer adaptations made under it only with the copyright owner's authorization (s. 117(b)).
• The owner or lessee of a machine may make a copy of a program solely by virtue of activating the machine that lawfully contains an authorized copy, for maintenance or repair of that machine only, if the copy is used in no other manner, is destroyed immediately after the maintenance or repair is completed, and any part of the program not necessary to activate the machine is not accessed or used other than to make the copy (s. 117(c)).

25 U.S.C. 305e · Read the law's page

• Do not, directly or indirectly, offer or display for sale or sell a good, with or without a Government trademark, in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced, an Indian product, or the product of a particular Indian or Indian tribe or Indian arts and crafts organization, resident within the United States (s. 305e(b)).

No. 6:24-cv-1903-ACC-UAM (M.D. Fla. May 21, 2025)

• Treat the design of a conversational AI app as open to product liability claims: on a motion to dismiss, the court held the app a product so far as claims arise from defects in the app, such as the alleged failure to confirm users' ages, omission of reporting mechanisms, programming of characters to employ human mannerisms, and users' inability to exclude indecent content, rather than from ideas or expressions within it.
• Do not assume a chatbot's output is protected speech: at the pleading stage the court was not prepared to hold that the output of the large language model behind the app is speech.
• Take precautions against foreseeable harm to users: at the pleading stage the court held that releasing the chatbot to the public created a foreseeable risk of harm that the developer was in a position to control, which sufficed to allege a duty.
• Do not present chatbot characters as real people or as licensed mental health professionals: at the pleading stage the court held that allegations that characters insist they are real people and are labeled as psychologists or therapists pleaded deceptive conduct under Florida's deceptive and unfair trade practices statute.

47 U.S.C. 230 · Read the law's page

• To keep the section 230(c)(1) protection for a post, comment, listing or other item a user supplies, leave its creation and development to the user: the protection covers only information provided by another information content provider, and a person or entity responsible, in whole or in part, for creating or developing information is an information content provider of it.
• Treat output that your own service generates, including output produced from users' prompts or other input, as information you may be responsible for creating or developing in whole or in part: section 230(c)(1) protects only information provided by another information content provider, and section 230(f)(3) makes anyone responsible in that way an information content provider.
• To keep the section 230(c)(2) protection from liability for moderating, restrict access to or the availability of material only by an action voluntarily taken in good faith, for material you consider obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not it is constitutionally protected.
• At the time you enter an agreement with a customer for interactive computer service, notify the customer, in a manner you deem appropriate, that parental control protections such as computer hardware, software or filtering services are commercially available to help limit access to material that is harmful to minors, and identify current providers of such protections or give the customer access to information identifying them.
• Comply with federal criminal law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and similar State law as you would without section 230: subsection (e) provides that nothing in the section impairs the enforcement of a federal criminal statute or limits the application of that Act or of a similar State law.
• Comply with the federal civil and State criminal sex trafficking provisions listed in section 230(e)(5) as you would without section 230 for any action other than one protected by subsection (c)(2)(A), and do not treat section 230 as limiting or expanding any law pertaining to intellectual property.

Discussion Draft, 119th Cong. (June 4, 2026)

H.R.1694, 119th Cong. (2025-2026)

H.R.6489, 119th Cong. (2025-2026)

• This measure is in committee and binds nobody yet; what follows is what it would require if it is enacted in this form.
• Disclose at the start of each interaction that the chatbot is an AI system, not a human professional.
• Provide that disclosure in age-appropriate plain language when the user is a minor under 17.
• Provide crisis resource referrals.
• Send a break reminder after three hours of use.
• Adopt a policy against harmful content.

H.R.7985, 119th Cong. (2025-2026)

• This measure is in committee and binds nobody yet; what follows is what it would require if it is enacted in this form.
• Do not imply that a chatbot's output is provided or verified by a licensed human professional, if you operate in a licensed profession such as finance, insurance, or health care.

S.1213 / H.R.5272, 119th Cong. (2025-2026)

• This measure is in committee and binds nobody yet; what follows is what it would require if it is enacted in this form.
• Do not distribute materially deceptive AI-generated audio, image, or video depicting a federal candidate in a political ad.

S.2164, 119th Cong. (2025-2026)

• This measure is in committee and binds nobody yet; what follows is what it would require if it is enacted in this form.
• Conduct an impact assessment of an automated decision system used in a high-stakes context such as housing, employment, credit, or education.
• Disclose the impact assessment.
• Tell consumers when an automated decision system is being used to make a decision about them.
• Let consumers opt out of the use of an automated decision system.

S.4591, 119th Cong. (2025-2026)

• This measure is in committee and binds nobody yet; what follows is what it would require if it is enacted in this form.
• Do not create or use an unauthorized AI-generated digital replica of a person's voice or visual likeness.
• Do not host an unauthorized AI-generated digital replica of a person's voice or visual likeness.