Congress is quietly drifting toward an ID-verified internet. The Children Harmed by AI Technology (CHAT) Act of 2025 is Washington's newest attempt to regulate speech through mandatory age checks. Rather than protecting kids, it would normalize showing a government ID for basic online speech.

The CHAT Act tries to target fictional role-play bots you've likely heard horror stories about. The problem is that the bill defines a chatbot so broadly that anything that "simulates emotional interaction" could be restricted. By the CHAT Act's standards, ChatGPT, some video game characters, or even a customer service bot could all require users to upload a government ID just to log in.

Large language models (LLMs) learn to write by training on billions of real conversations and stories. That makes

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