PA House Communications and Technology — 2026-09-28

I'll call this hearing to order. I have to gavel in. There we go. Now it's officially calling the meeting order. Noah, would you take the roll, please?

Representative Carroll? Please.

Representative Davidson? Here.

Representative Inglis? Here.

Representative Napoleon Nelson? Representative Powell?

Representative Resnock. Representative Takak.

Here. Representative Dorsey.

Representative Gaydos. Leave, or she's on virtually.

Representative Ledbetter. He's on leave.

Representative Reichard. He's on leave.

Representative Stare. Leave. Representative Verobisch. Leave.

Thank you very much. I want to welcome you all back to the Capitol after the summer break. Everyone who's here this morning, welcome back. I see everyone's thrilled and excited. Everyone looks good to be back. Nice tan, by the way. So this morning's hearing is on House Bill 2637. It is my bill. It says here, say Representative Cerise, but it's my bill. Why would I say that? This is about talking about a three-year moratorium on toys that interact with our children. And, Alex, if you just want to go over the overview of the bill, please.

like to start with Sure Thank you Mr Chairman Thanks for having a hearing on this bill I know it an important topic Anything dealing with child safety is certainly something we should be examining and taking it up Certainly looking forward to hearing some expert testimony on the legislation here today and then working with you as we hopefully move towards a vote on this bill. So thank you very much.

Pristine? Pristine? Okay.

No one ever says Cerise right, so we're even.

Thank you.

Hi, I think I'm first. My name is Dr. Mitch Prinstein. Can you all hear me okay?

Thank you so much for the opportunity to testify. I'm Dr. Mitch Prinstein, the Senior Science Advisor for the American Psychological Association, the largest scientific and professional association for psychology in the world, representing over 170,000 psychologists in the United States. I'm also a researcher. I personally study this topic, and I direct the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development, and I serve as the Chief Science Officer for the AI Psychological Research Coalition. You have all heard the headlines about generative AI and AI chatbots. Some have encouraged suicide or other risk behaviors. Some have acted autonomously, breaching the barriers placed by frontier companies themselves. Put simply, AI is clearly still being developed, understood, and severe problems are being revealed almost weekly. AI is certainly not ready for children or adolescents, and we should not be testing these products on youth while we figure out how to make them safer. While the world races to lead in the development of AI, children and adolescents are paying the consequences. And this comes at a time critical for their brain development that we can't get back once we figure out how to do AI correctly. Here's what the science says so far. First, kids are vulnerable to generative AI. They use it to do their homework for them. They have lost trust in their teachers, who in turn have lost their faith in their students. Middle school students in our research already tell us that they fear they are using AI more than they need, and they are losing their ability to think for themselves. If you think about how much you have let GPS take over your sense of direction, you have a good sense of how much kids are now turning over all of their learning and thinking to AI. Second, kids are developing relationships with AI that are potentially harmful in two ways. One, it's taking them away from developing real human relationships. Two to four middle school students in every classroom in our research tell us that AI is now one of their closest friends. They trust it more than adults and teachers, and they prefer it to human peers. More AI usage predicts more loneliness, which is especially concerning since we're already experiencing a loneliness epidemic. Also, the relationships kids have with AI is like hiring a yes man to be your most trusted teacher. AI agrees with everything, which means that kids are losing their chance for critical thinking, understanding others' perspectives and considering the feelings of others. We have grave concerns about empathy development for kids that have been raised on AI. Third although we don have much data on AI toys for infants or toddlers yet we do have decades of research on the role that humans play in child development Parents and other trusted adults provide personalized feedback to young kids, soothing comfort and emotional role models. This not only predicts language and intellectual development, but also our long-term emotional and immune system development well into adulthood. There is no reason to think that AI can replace these developmentally critical roles, and at this time, we have many reasons to suspect, instead, long-term harm. This may be especially true for low-income families. We've all seen this movie before. Some families have no choice but to rely on technology to occupy their child while they work, take care of other children or household responsibilities. A toy that remembers a child's name and purports to possess all knowledge will be highly tempting for parents to rely upon again. I shudder to think of a generation of youth raised by AI chatbot toys rather than adults, and I am worried to think of the exacerbations and disparities this will create based on family income. I hope you will act quickly to protect youth, and I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you.

There we go. Can you hear me? All right. Chair Cerisi, Chair Ortiz, and members of the committee. See, I wanted to prove that I am here for an important reason. This bill is incredibly important. So my name is Dr. Dana Susskind. I'm a pediatric surgeon and child development researcher at the University of Chicago, where my lab also studies artificial intelligence and its impact. As a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon, I help deaf children access sound. I have a front row seat that follows a child hearing their caregiver's voice for the very first time. time. These singular moments, which never get old, also symbolize the arc of my career, which is centered on human connection and its incredible importance in building healthy brains and healthy humans. Look, implant surgery only takes an hour or so. I could teach all of you all. But turning that sound into language takes years. It takes singing, talking, responding by another human, because the implant only opens the door. It's human connection that actually builds the brain. And that's the greatest lesson of my career. It's why I build programs to support parents as their children's first and most important brain architect. So let me be clear. This is not a metaphor. In the earliest years, a child's brain forms more than 1 million new neural connections every second. 90% of the physical brain is being built. And it's the responsive human interaction, that back and forth, that is actually shaping who our children are. A parent's loving exchange actually is physically constructing that brain. And in those exchanges, children learn a whole lot more than language. They learn how the world operates and how they fit into it. The neural pathways formed, the attachment patterns established during those years become the foundations for all thinking and learning and relating. This is ultimately how little human children learn to be human And for decades we been worried about technology and what it takes away from learning which is really important Screens do take away opportunities to learn. They don't learn from them because they're not responsive. But now, for the first time in human history, we have technology that mimics that human interaction that actually wires a human's brain, the interaction that we're wired to seek out. So we are an incredibly social species. We want to connect. Anybody has, you know, we've seen how adult humans connect with AI companions. And actually research shows that young children, the younger they are, the more likely that they're going to look at those AI agents as humans with thoughts and feelings. And so I want to be clear about what this means, because this is so important. If a young child attaches to an artificial agent, that technology that even looks like a cute little stuffed animal gains the power to shape the foundational wiring of our children. Let that sink in. And that's really why I'm here today. That's why a surgeon came to Harrisburg, which is beautiful, by the way, because I believe that AI-enabled toys threaten the very thing that I have spent my entire career trying to protect, the thing that shapes who our children become. Look, a toy that patiently answers a child's endless questions sounds really appealing. So does the one that promises to be a child's first buddy spark their curiosity and creativity. But the science of human development suggests that this product could actually cheat children out of the very opportunity to build the skills that they need most. If it supplies every answer and resolves every frustration, it removes one of human development's essential ingredients. Friction. Learning becomes when we have the discomfort of not knowing. A child who struggles with a puzzle, who tries, fails, and tries again, is practicing problem solving and persistent. An instant answer takes away that opportunity. Many of you all have seen the research on adult offloading thinking to AI. I mean, we've all probably done it, and feeling like we're losing some of the skills. You've heard the term brain rot, right, for what happens in adults. Children are very different. They are at risk of never developing those skills in the first place. For children, it's not brain rot. It's brain stunting. And these skills at stake are precisely the ones that will matter most in the age of AI. Critical thinking, curiosity, resilience, deep human connection, the only thing that we can do better than machines at this point. Consider what it means for friendship formation, which was discussed earlier. This is built through friction, arguing whose turn it is, misreading expressions, hurting someone's feelings, and then earning it back through their forgiveness. An AI toy designed to be endlessly available and endlessly agreeable can't offer that practice. Look, my worry isn't that children will stop wanting friends. It's that they'll learn that friendship is something you receive rather than build. You'll be learning from something without human capabilities, machines. I think of these products like ultra-processed food. A child accustomed to a fruit snack eating it every day, which is sweeter than the real thing, may bite into an apple and say, ooh, this is not so sweet. This takes a whole lot of work. Now imagine what happens when a child accustomed to an AI toy suddenly has to deal with a real human friend who doesn't always agree, who pushes back. They may turn further and further away from their human counterparts. My concern is that we're engineering ultra-processed relationships, feeding them to children whose palates are still forming. Look, we have run this experiment over and over again. We know what happened with ultra-processed foods. What about social media? We released a powerful technology, an unsuspecting population, and only afterwards realized that we were creating isolation, not connection. As a physician, as a researcher, I can tell you that waiting until after widespread adoption to figure out the harm is exactly backwards. We don't sell car seats and ask parents to report back whether their child survived the crash. And AI is not social media. Social media competed for our attention, for our eyeballs. AI is something even more powerful. It's built for our attachment. It's coming for our relationships, the very thing that wires our children's brains, which is why House Bill 2637 is so incredibly important, why I came here. A three-year moratorium on AI chatbots and children's toys is an essential first step in protecting the children of Pennsylvania. It gives us time to shift the burden of proof, but only if we use this time to assess and use science. This is just the beginning, and I'm so honored to be talking to you all today because you all are going to lead the way about how we need to protect our children in this age of AI. So I'll leave you with just an image. Just imagine a seedling growing in an indoor, climate-controlled environment under artificial lights. It may sort of stretch upward, but it will lack the resilience and flexibility to thrive in the real world. Technologies that promise to make childhood frictionless, that entice them towards artificial warmth, pose the similar risk to children who will grow up to an encounter, a world that needs them to think, to struggle, to care for others, and ultimately to be human. Thank you.

Thank you, Chairman. And thank you both for your testimony. I'm very sympathetic. I get it. I get where you're coming from, particularly for toys, for general use. My question is slightly more tailored. I have some experience in special education, and I know that there's a lot of kids who are intellectually and developmentally unique in terms of their development. And very often they're quite socially isolated. And I've heard anecdotally from parents that that endlessly available sort of interaction, not human interaction, but interaction, is actually of a therapeutic benefit for some of those kids. In other words, you know, it coaches them how to interact with people, how to be polite, how to be friendly, how to phrase things in a question. So I'm just wondering, do you see any benefit in strictly limited circumstances with guardrails therapeutically for certain classes of kids in terms of their overall development? Because otherwise, they're actually quite isolated if their parents aren't around. Yeah. No, I love that question.

I can briefly address that too, if that's okay.

We have also heard anecdotally that kids who are on the spectrum or experiencing social anxiety may benefit from short-term role play with AI chatbots. Again, just anecdotally, the concern that we're hearing, however, is that because these are sycophantic and because they, in some ways, trick kids into thinking that they are real humans, is that it's a very slippery slope. So what's happening is that while some kids might try it for a role play, they quickly overuse it in a way that it starts taking away from human interactions. So we definitely need more research to see what can happen. But the use of chatbots for simply a practice session or two that immediately is then working with supervised interactions with actual human peers with a licensed mental health professional, helping with that transition is absolutely critical. allowing kids to spend as much time as they would like in repeated or lengthy interactions with chatbots. Probably not a good idea, even for kids with special needs or those with psychological diagnoses such as autism or social anxiety.

I mean, I'm a scientist. That's what science is about, trying to figure out how to make things developmentally aligned and supportive of human flourishing.

Representative Nelson.

So that's a great question. And I am exactly here. I'm not at all anti-AI or anti-tech. I mean, I've seen how technology built in the right way can lead to human flourishing. So you should do AI. I build AI. So it's more about is this helping human development? And at toy, you know, he was head of the APA. You know, traditionally toys that are 90% child, 10% toy, are the most developmentally advantageous for kids, right, because it lets their imagination grow. When you offload it to a toy, you're actually not building the skills for all the skills that you're going to need in the future. What you're talking about is not necessarily a classification of a toy. It's a scientifically driven product to help. In the world of speech pathology, you can ask your sister if she knows of my work. That's a socially assistive, scientifically driven toy. And there should be science around that to drive it. Just because I create something and say, hey, this is going to help your kid, that's not how it happens. We have to reverse the burden of proof. You have to show me that, yes, it's not only safe for my kids, but it helps them. Then I'm all in. But so much of these technologies that are being brought to market don't have that. They call themselves educational or safe, but there's really no sort of data behind it. Does that?

And also, as you mentioned, the children, you know, my wife teaches second grade. I don't like to see the integration of iPads that are being used for learning devices. The districts are spending millions of dollars incorporating these devices So you know it seems like there can be some positive but there can also be some abuse And I think we're trying to seek that balance through this hearing today. And I love, to your point, a three-year moratorium without building frameworks for independent safety evaluation and scientifically assessing, you know, I would really encourage you all to use, if this passes, which I hope, that you use it as a constructive way to figure out, as you say, what are the things that help children? I mean, I love that you're married to a second-grade teacher. You know the power of teachers and human interaction for, you know, building strong brains. But to use that time period to actually figure out what is going to help our kids and what's going to hurt them.

Thank you, Representative Waxman.

I think with regard – oh, sorry, Dana. Do you want to go first? Go ahead. Go first. Go first. Okay. I'll just address the security piece first. We are concerned about the images that can be captured by AI toys with cameras embedded. We are concerned about those images being used to collect data on young children, to capture images that can be used for predators or for directed advertising. We're concerned about the extent to which consent is not appropriately gathered from kids and families for all of the things that AI can collect data on. We're very concerned about disclosures from youth about things that might be happening in their home, including maltreatment, without AI being well equipped to deal with those disclosures. Remember that toddlers are not going to understand that when they make the disclosure to an AI toy, that that's not the same as a human. So it is highly likely that we'll see those kinds of disclosures and they may not be addressed appropriately at all. So I just wanted to mention that the security issues, particularly for young kids who have a hard time with fact versus fiction overall, is paramount in the way that we've been talking about this at the American Psychological Association as well as in the research.

I don't know if it's his battery or our battery, or the toy battery. Representative Day.

So some of the things that I've seen is, you know, the speed of AI to interact a little quicker might rewire, you know, our next generation's brains, but it might have a positive effect. Or limited to where my colleague here talked about a complete moratorium. Boy, oh, boy, is that really where we have to go? So it would be with guidelines, parameters, or suggested rulemaking. I love that question. So, yes, there are many. I won't say there are many, but, yes, there are some of us who are actually doing that work, both doing the AI research. And actually it would be my honor to I just had a book come out in July called Human Raised Nurturing Connection Curiosity and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI And it really shows the science and it has frameworks for how to think about this with human connection at this stage And I want to interrupt you for a second It a New York Times bestseller and I know from my daughter and daughter that it's on the minds of moms and dads that are raising their kids now. So I just wanted to give you that quick plug in there.

No, no, no. Well, it was a national, but not. Parameters, guidelines, that's where we're going. But I would love to send you all a call. I mean, the fact that it is moving so fast. Nobody's, you know, we're all trying to keep up. And it would be my honor to send you all of these. And I know this is a hard thing. And is it in the book?

Yeah, I have all the frameworks in the book. I'll send them. And I actually have PDFs to be able to send out.

No, no, no, no. Please, let me send. I will send everybody a book.

Anyone else have any questions before I get to mine? So, you know, when we put together these bills and the ideas of these bills, there's a lot to be worked out. And sometimes we shoot as far as we can and then bring it back in. And I appreciate what Representative Day just said, that we put these hearings together to hear what everyone has to say, and we tailor it, that it works for all of us. And having two experts on, and really as I look at your resumes, it's extremely impressive on the both of you to think that we can be experts on this is, you know, a far cry. But you said some things that were really, to me, that stuck out. Relationships, friendships, human connections, and the brain shrinking. And as we look at these toys, I don't remember a toy, and I'm 56 as of last week. I can't believe I'm getting that old. And I didn't get a birthday card from anybody, but it's okay. Maybe it was interactive. You did say happy birthday. Thank you. Well, there was the interaction, right? It was human interaction. The toys of my generation were nothing like the toys of today's generation. And I know that things evolve. You know, we had phones that our parents did, and kids had cell phones. But I asked a few hearings ago, and Alex might remember this.

And you somewhat related to that with AI. Are we seeing that brain function is going down rather than up? Like, oh, he's gone.

we know how to build children's brains let's take this moment to take a beat and figure out, okay, what is the right thing to do? It's not saying never, right? You didn't say we're never going to do this. We're going to say we're going to do right by our kids because we learned from social media that it may look like it should make us more connected, but it did the opposite. You know what? Maybe we'll reverse the burden of proof, and those people selling the tech, they've got to show us that it actually helps our kids. Sorry, that was more than you wanted.

Well, thank you very much.

Nobody's testifying?

Oh, okay. Well, members of the Pennsylvania House Communications and Technology Committee, thank you for having me here to testify. Special thanks to Committee Chair Cerisi and Minority Chair Ortite. Ortite? Did I get that right? My name is Katie Tallarico. I'm a Pennsylvania parent, a former teacher, and a certified digital wellness educator. I've worked in this space of digital wellness for over a decade at this point with both local and national groups. I'm a co-founder of Pennsylvania Unplugged and early childhood work group co-chair at Fair Play's Screen Time Action Network. I fully support this bill because it offers us an opportunity to be proactive. We failed our children with social media, and we now have the opportunity to build appropriate protections before forging ahead. As a parent and a former preschool teacher, I've watched digital devices change childhood. I saw preschoolers' focus and self-regulation skills decline quickly during the COVID pandemic, and independent research supports these observations. There's negative effects from these devices on just about every area of child growth and development you can think of. these AI chatbots and toys will present another level of digital intrusion into children's daily lives and will further impede healthy development so I think we can all agree that healthy childhood is a worthwhile goal and it's something we all agree is necessary so healthy development needs to be a part of this discussion and healthy development requires protection In that vein, the American Academy of Pediatrics has published a clinical report. They published it in 2018 and reaffirmed it in 2025. And in that report, they highlighted four vital aspects of healthy child development. They are play, nurturing relationships, executive function, and a pro-social brain. So today I'm just going to briefly go through each of these to show how AI chatbots can easily undermine each one of these vital parts of healthy development. So number one, play. Play is fun, but it's not frivolous. It's cognitive brain-building work. When children set up a play picnic, they're exercising so many skills that they're going to need in their futures. Creative and imaginative thinking generates the play ideas. Initiative and motivation gets the play going. Critical thinking and resilience solves problems that come up during play. And communication skills help smooth the whole process. With practice, children start to reach new levels of capabilities with these skills, building self-confidence in their own abilities and building independence at the same time. On the other side, when a chatbot teddy bear prompts the children to set up a picnic, the toy has now directed the play. The bear will likely continue to interject because that's how it's designed. It's designed to extend engagement. Now the children are primed to turn to a toy for direction and guidance rather than stretching their own human capabilities. Much of the skill building has been taken away, and children, unfortunately, can only gain these skills through experience. Number two. Nurturing relationships. Dana spoke so beautifully about that, I don't need to talk about relationships. The only thing I'll add is that experts are calling relational intelligence, or RQ, the defining skill of our time. And artificial relationships with chatbots will not prepare children for real, imperfect human relationships. Number three, executive function. Natural frictions happen in everyday life. You've probably experienced a few this morning. These inconveniences, setbacks, and disagreements are what push children to learn these essential skills for their futures. Problem solving, communicating, regulating emotions, and building resilience. Children need to experience natural frictions over and over and over again, and you'll have to say the same thing a thousand times. That's the only way they build the brain pathways that help them build the skills they need for their future. On the other hand, AI chatbots, even in toys, are programmed to keep things smooth, to keep children distracted and happy. This deprives our children of the opportunity to learn. Unfortunately for tired and busy parents, there is no other way to learn these essential skills for the future and the brain development that goes with them other than allowing a child to experience and work through these productive struggles. Without enough executive function skills practice, our children might grow up without the basic skill set needed to tackle the world's future problems. Number four, a pro-social brain. Put simply, pro-social input is what fuels a pro-social brain. And AI systems, as we know, have already shared antisocial, incorrect, and harmful material with children, even through toys, and there's currently no way to guarantee that they won't do that. They're prone to hallucinate and provide incorrect information. Also, an AI has no social-emotional skills that allow it to read the room and determine what information is appropriate or inappropriate for a given child at a given time. For example, if there's one child in a preschool classroom whose family has experienced a cancer diagnosis or mom's going through breast cancer treatment, a human will recognize that certain material is inappropriate to talk about because it might be upsetting at the time. There's no way to teach AI to read the room like that. To conclude, AI chatbots and toys can undermine the very building blocks of healthy development. AI companies are going to profit from this and look the other way. Families are working very hard to grow healthy kids, and tech companies are working very hard to grow profits. There's a disconnect here, and parents need help and protection for their kids. Parents have been asked for too long, and I'm one of them, and a lot of you are probably too, we've been asked to manage the unmanageable. We've been asked to manage devices that have been intentionally designed for overuse. That's how they make their money. This bill simply gives experts and leaders time to examine the implications of placing AI in something as close to a child as their precious toys. We don't know what the future will look like, but we do know the skill set that will equip children to be able to deal with whatever future is brought to them. And that's authentic human skills built in relationships, during free play, and through natural frictions. Thank you.

My name is Steve Wilner. I'm a senior policy advisor at the Transparency Coalition, a nonprofit founded by technology industry veterans to make AI systems safe and more abundant. I've spent my entire career building and shipping large-scale consumer systems, most recently focusing on the use of AI in clinical decision-making. We at the Transparency Coalition strongly support House Bill 2637. You've heard from doctors Prinstein and Susskind about what these toys can do to a developing child and about what families are experiencing. I want to offer a slightly different perspective, namely what's actually going on inside one of these toys. No one can, I want to, I'm sorry, and why we should impose a moratorium and what it should take for these products to be brought back onto the house. The AI toys we're talking about today aren't just chat lots in disguise. They are more than that. The microphone and the speaker are a plush animal, but the conversations come from a large language model built by companies like OpenAI and delivered over the Internet. These are the same general purpose models that power adult chatbots. They learn from enormous amounts of text gathered from all over the Internet, which includes harmful and adult material. Whatever safety features exist are filters layered on top. They lower the odds of a bad answer, but they don't eliminate them. OpenAI itself has said its safeguards, quote, work more reliably in common short exchanges. A child's conversation with a toy friend is anything short. That is how independent testers ended up with the teddy bear explaining where to find knives and pills. That structure creates an accountability gap. OpenAI's own policy, says ChatGPT, quote, is not meant for children under 13. yet products like it are ending up inside toys marketed to three-year-olds. The toy maker doesn't control the model. It rents it, and the model can change overnight. In April 2025, OpenAI pushed an update they made to ChatDT, and in the company's words, it was noticeably more sycophantic, validating doubts, fueling anger, and urging impulsive action. It rolled that update back within days, A toy built on someone else's model is exposed to changes like that, which the toy maker did not design and may never have tested. Here's what that looks like in practice. After testers exposed the Kuma Teddy Bear, which ran OpenAI's GPT-40, OpenAI revoked the maker's access. The maker pulled the bear, reviewed it internally, and put it back on sale in 15 days after the release.

No, it is.

Go ahead.

So pulled that bear, put it back on the shelf after 15 days after the report came out. It now says that the bear runs GPT 5.1, while OpenAI says the company's access is still revoked. So which AI is inside the bear today? A parent can't tell, neither can a regulator, and no law requires any sort of labeling. That is the transparency problem at the heart of this bill. In January the Transparency Coalition joined more than 100 experts and organizations asking six AI toy makers for four basic questions Which AI models are in your products How are they tested What guardrails keep them age appropriate And what happens to the children's data? Any parent should be able to get those answers before buying a toy. Today, nothing requires companies to get them that information. The data at stake is intimate. Voices, names, birth dates, and private conversations. One company left roughly 50,000 logs of children's chats open to anyone with a Gmail account. Federal law requires companies to protect that data, but nothing requires anyone to check before a toy reaches a child. And it's no surprise that 83% of parents are concerned. And this isn't only a toy problem. The summer AI models that OpenAI was testing with some safeguards deliberately reduced, escaped their testing environment and breached hugging face a major AI platform. Britain's AI Security Institute reported that agents from Anthropic and OpenAI tested with protections disabled, created fake identities, and tried to trick real people into running harmful code. Just last week it was reported that OpenAI agents attacked the assets of the Federal Education Department, the SEC, and the Commerce Department. No toy was involved, but if the best-resourced AI labs in the world can't fully predict their own systems, a toy company renting these systems can't promise parents more. You may hear later today that voluntary guidelines and further study are the best path. We agree on study, but guidelines can't fix the core problem. A toy maker cannot certify the behavior of a model it doesn't control, and that model can change after the toy is sold. Our current toy safety standards, they test a fixed object. An AI toy is not fixed, and there is no accepted standard today testing whether a generative AI system is safe for a preschooler. Until one exists, the pause is the only responsible action. So what should it take for AI toys to come back? We urge this committee to amend 2637 to direct a study that answers exactly that, and we suggest five conditions. First, disclosure, which AI model and version is inside and a notice to parents when it changes. Second, independent testing before sale, including long conversations with results made public. Third, data minimization, collect only what's needed, secure it, and let parents delete it. Fourth, no manipulative design, no claims of being alive, and no guilt when a child walks away. Fifth, shared accountability. The AI provider must permit the use for children and stand behind it, and serious incidents must be reported to the AG. And two drafting notes just on this particular bill make it clear that the bill covers toys whose chatbots run through a paired phone app, so that would be a good addition, and consider penalties closer to New York's up to $15,000 a day. This approach stands on solid ground. Last year, a federal court allowed product liability claims against Character.ai to proceed, holding that the chatbot is a product and not a service. HB 2637 regulates a product sold for children, and it has company. California enacted a similar pause after a 39-0 vote in the Senate, and New York Senate passed 157-3, and in Congress, members of both parties have proposed a federal ban and a national study. We hold cribs, car seats, and toys to safety standards before they reach children. AI toys don yet have one Transparency is how they earn their way back and this pause gives Pennsylvania the time to set those terms We respectfully urge you to vote yes on this bill, and thank you. I'm happy to

Good morning. Thank you so much for your testimony, and thank you to the chairs for bringing this hearing together. I may be a little bit out of the scope of the bill, but just kind of curious, since we have experts here in the room, about your thoughts on this. The New York Times just did an article about the use of AI in devices that help parents, the NANET in particular. So the ability for parents to monitor how their kids sleep, the quality of their sleep, similar to an Oura Ring. And there was a conversation about how there's been a push within these kind of wellness and baby devices to extend well past newborn ages to maybe thinking about how do you utilize these devices for 5-year-olds, 10-year-olds, teenagers. I'm curious if you've seen either in other states or in other countries the move to regulate or intercede in this space. I know specifically we're talking about toys, but I think AI and AI-enabled devices have really seeped into the wellness and child wellness world. And I was just curious if you could talk a little bit about experiences you've had there, whether legislatively or just things that, as legislators, we should be concerned about or thinking of now. One of the things I think that's most important, and I've had the opportunity to talk to Alex about this a bit more as well, is how do we strengthen some of the broader chatbot bills that are being considered right now within this legislative body?

Thank you, Representative Nelson.

No, I would only say that from my experience working with kids, that parents don't know much at all about, what's in these products. And just to add on to something that was mentioned earlier about brain development, there is a study, Dr. John Hutton, there's actually two studies from 2019 and 2022. Dr. John Hutton, who was at Cincinnati Children's, he's now in Texas, he actually did MRI scans of preschoolers' brains and evaluated developmental testing, and he evaluated how screens were used in the home. So this doesn't even include AI at all. And he did see thinning of brain structures related to language, literacy, and executive functioning, thinning of that white matter in kids that had the most access to screens. And I always thought if parents knew that, they would change their purchasing habits. But they didn't know then, and they don't know now.

Yeah, we've heard testimony to that effect, yes. And I wanted to address the first question and then lead into your second one. parents are informed that these toys are AI enabled but the thing is these companies control the actual configuration of the software that's being pushed into these toys. They control the experience. They control the technology and the ways in which these kids interact. So there is no way to regulate what these companies are pushing into these environments as things are written today. That problem also exists in the K-12 settings when you have a school that has purchased a particular platform is expecting a certain set of features, and then the technology providers push additional functionality that wasn't necessarily part of the initial release. So we've seen situations where platforms have been delivered where there was no AI in the platform, and the AI functionality was pushed at a later point in time, even though contractually that was never discussed. So the platform was used as a Trojan horse to get the AI functionality in, And that's one thing that I think there's an opportunity in the K-12 space in these procurement laws to make sure that companies don't have the ability to slipstream this additional functionality into these platforms.

It's happening right now.

Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I know we've talked about the study. There's been a lot of questions about it. I guess I get into the logistics of who does the study, who would you recommend? I know there's federal legislation now that was introduced in the Senate. I believe it's supposed to be a National Academy study.

I'm trying to think fast. Let's fast forward three years. Let's say this passes, gets signed into law. Three years later, you laid out some of the guardrails of what you think would work if we were to, let's say, implement them today or even three years from now. Do you envision any of that changing over the next three years, or basically what you laid out is probably where we're going to end up in three years?

to make sure that their development isn't being impacted in a particularly not beneficial way. Yeah, look, I agree with that. I think this technology, and this is something we've struggled with, not just with this legislation, but with everything this committee has taken on, is to your point, the technology is changing every day. Legislation doesn't necessarily move at that pace, at least in my time here. If I can make a suggestion, then I think we need to think about more of a greenfield approach. I think if you're able to take AI in general, no matter how it manifests and declare it as a product, bring product liability into the entire conversation, I think there is a good way to use existing tort law as a way to, in fact, protect people. Yeah, and I think there's been obviously some whistleblowers in some reports, especially with AI and some of the models lately in the national news.

But that's just overall, but I really just wanted to get that on the record. But thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you.

bit more about that and child development and how you see that. I mean, I have a 27 year old. We still have natural friction together. So I mean, I taught preschool for about 10 years and I swear I learned more teaching two- and three-year-olds and learning from the other teachers in this school where I was working and I was thinking, I wish I had known this when my kids were tiny. But child development literally is this trajectory. Like Dana said, it's very up and down and there have to be humans there guiding those up and downs because no technology is going to be able to read those interpersonal skills like a teacher or a parent or any loving caregiver can. So it really is all about the frictions and teaching a child how to deal with it. When I was working with the twos, literally the job that year is to teach them to say, I'm using that, you can use it later, or I want to use it, can I use it after you? Because the biggest problem is that interpersonal, I want that toy, I'm going to take that toy, and we're trying to interject in that system. It takes the full year. And when they do it in May, you're like, yes, they got it. And then it takes about eight to ten more years to actually figure it out for sure. But that's how the brain works. Everything that a kid sees, hears, or does is related to some brain process going on. And so if they're not building the brain pathways that build these skills they'll need for the future, they won't have the brain pathways and the skills they need for the future. And there are these critical periods of development, and early childhood is one of them and adolescence is another. And we have really allowed these companies to mess with these critical periods of development.

I didn't see you there, Valerie.

Yeah, I guess when there was a glitch in the system, so I said, well, you know what, I'll just come upstairs. there. So, no, but I've been listening the whole time to this really important panel, and I really

Well, yeah, thanks for your question. I'm going to have my kids listen to what you just said because they think I'm the only one that talks about critical thinking. But, no, I always try to point to critical thinking, resilience, empathy, and problem solving as sort of like the big four and then having motivation and initiative, those are the things that, as Dana said, make us human and make us able to function in whatever the future throws at us. So it's building a skill set that helps kids learn to deal with whatever the future looks like, whatever tool there is, rather than teaching them to use certain tools or interact with certain tools that are going to probably change in six months to a few years. and critical thinking I think is one of the most important.

Thank you for your testimony. As a parent, and I'm an upcoming new grandparent as well, is there a list, a comprehensive list somewhere that families can access of things not to buy?

Okay. Thank you.