HB 635 — Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Act; established, prohibited practices, penalties.
VA 20261 session
Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Act established; prohibited practices; penalties. Creates the Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Act, which prohibits an operator from making a companion chatbot, as those terms are defined in the bill, available to a user in the Commonwealth unless the companion chatbot is incapable of certain actions specified in the bill. The bill also requires an operator of a companion chatbot to include a disclaimer to users of all ages that a companion chatbot is not a human via a static, persistent disclosure and notify a user via a pop-up that he is not engaging with a human counterpart at specified intervals. The bill makes it unlawful for any operator of a companion chatbot to operate or provide a companion chatbot to a user unless such companion chatbot contains a protocol to take reasonable efforts for detecting and addressing expressions of suicidal ideation or self-harm by a user to the companion chatbot. The bill also includes certain data privacy and transparency requirements. The bill provides that a violation of its provisions constitutes a prohibited practice under the Virginia Consumer Protection Act.
Latest action: — Continued
Sponsors (7)
- Michelle Lopes Maldonado (D, VA) — sponsor
- Jackie H. Glass (D, VA) — cosponsor
- Irene Shin (D, VA) — cosponsor
- Bonita G. Anthony (D, VA) — cosponsor
- Margaret A. Franklin (D, VA) — cosponsor
- C.E. Cliff Hayes, Jr. (D, VA) — cosponsor
- Rozia A. Henson, Jr. (D, VA) — cosponsor
Action timeline (6)
- · house · H4020 —
- · house · H2101 —
- · house · H2112 —
- · house · H8120 —
- · house · H2143 —
- · house · H2140 —
Text versions (0)
No text versions on file yet — same ingest as the action timeline populates these. Each version has direct links to the XML / HTML / PDF at govinfo.gov.
Bill text (extracted)
Amendments
Congressional Research Service briefs (0)
CRS reports that cite this bill in their relatedMaterials — what Congress was reading on the topic. Click any report for its summary, formats, and bill-citation walk.
No CRS reports cite this bill yet.
Connected on the graph
1 typed relationship in the influence graph — 0 inbound, 1 outbound, grouped by type.
referred to committee (1)
| date | dir | entity | amount | role | source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | → | HST Sub: Technology and Innovation | — | va-leg |
Who matters on this bill
Who matters
Members ranked by combined influence on this bill: role (sponsor 5 / cosponsor 1), capped speech count from the Congressional Record, and recorded-vote engagement.
| # | Member | Role | Speeches | Voted | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michelle Lopes Maldonado (D, state_lower VA) | sponsor | 0 | — | 5 |
| 2 | Bonita G. Anthony (D, state_lower VA) | cosponsor | 0 | — | 1 |
| 3 | C.E. Cliff Hayes, Jr. (D, state_lower VA) | cosponsor | 0 | — | 1 |
| 4 | Irene Shin (D, state_lower VA) | cosponsor | 0 | — | 1 |
| 5 | Jackie H. Glass (D, state_lower VA) | cosponsor | 0 | — | 1 |
| 6 | Margaret A. Franklin (D, state_lower VA) | cosponsor | 0 | — | 1 |
| 7 | Rozia A. Henson, Jr. (D, state_lower VA) | cosponsor | 0 | — | 1 |
Stance (positions taken)
Predicted vote
Aggregated from: actual roll-call votes (when present) → sponsor → cosponsor → party median (predicts YES when ≥25% of the caucus sponsored/cosponsored). Each row labels its confidence tier so you can see why a position was predicted.
0 predicted yes (0%) · 543 predicted no (100%) · 0 unknown (0%)
By party: · R: 0 yes / 277 no · D: 0 yes / 263 no · I: 0 yes / 3 no
Timeline
Every typed-graph event involving this entity, newest first. Each row is one edge in the influence graph; the inline strip under the row shows the counterpart's own context (a bill's latest action, a hearing's chamber + date, a filing's form type + filed date, a clip's source + excerpt) so the timeline reads like a Wikipedia citation rail.
- 2026-05-24 · was referred to HST Sub: Technology and Innovation · va-leg