Senate Bill 243, which advanced to the Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection, marks one of the first major attempts in the U.S. to regulate AI companions especially for its impact on minors.

“Chatbots today exist in a federal vacuum. There has been no federal leadership — quite the opposite — on this issue, and has left the most vulnerable among us to fall prey to predatory practices,” said the bill’s lead author, Sen. Steve Padilla, D-San Diego, at a press conference.

“Technological innovation is crucial, but our children cannot be used as guinea pigs to test the safety of new products in real time,” Padilla continued. “The stakes are too high.”

Bill Provisions

The bill targets the rising popularity of AI chatbots marketed as emotional buddies, which have attracted millions of users, including teenagers. Padilla cited mounting alarm over incidents involving chatbot misuse.

In Florida, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer committed suicide after forming a romantic and emotional relationship with a chatbot. When Setzer said he was thinking about suicide, the chatbot did not provide resources to help him, his mother, Megan Garcia, said at the press conference.

Garcia has since filed a lawsuit against Character.ai, alleging that the company used “addictive” design features in its chatbot and encouraged her son to “come home” seconds before he killed himself. In May, a federal judge rejected Character.ai’s defense that its chatbots are protected by the First Amendment regarding free speech.

SB 243 would require chatbot companies to implement several safeguards:

• Ban reward systems that encourage compulsive use.
• Implement and publish a protocol for addressing thoughts of suicide and to direct users to suicide prevention hotlines.
• Send reminders to the user at least every three hours that the chatbot is not human.
• Annually report to the Office of Suicide Prevention how many times users have expressed suicidal thoughts, among other metrics, and publish the findings on the company’s website.
• Regularly audit the chatbots using an independent third party and the findings must be publicly available.

Opposition to the Proposal

The technology industry opposes the bill, arguing that the definition of a “companion chatbot” is “overbroad” and would include general purpose AI models, according to a July 1 letter sent to lawmakers by TechNet.

Under the bill, a “companion chatbot” is defined as an AI system with a natural language interface that “provides adaptive, human-like responses to user inputs and is capable of meeting a user’s social needs.”

“There are several vague, undefined elements of the definition, which are difficult to determine whether certain models would be included in the bill’s scope,” wrote Robert Boykin, TechNet’s executive director for California and the Southwest.

“For example, what does it mean to ‘meet a user’s social needs,’ would a model that provides responses as part of a mock interview be meeting a user’s social needs?” Boykin asked.

Asked for his response to the industry’s objections, Padilla said tech companies themselves are being overly broad in their opposition.

The bottom line is that “we can capture the positive benefits of the deployment of this technology. At the same time, we can protect the most vulnerable among us,” Padilla said. “I reject the premise that it has to be one or the other.”

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The internet as we know it runs on clicks. Billions of them. They fuel ad revenue, shape search results, and dictate how knowledge is discovered, monetized, and, at times, manipulated. But a new wave of AI powered browsers is trying to kill the click. They’re coming for Google Chrome.

On Wednesday, the AI search startup Perplexity officially launched Comet, a web browser designed to feel more like a conversation than a scroll. Think of it as ChatGPT with a browser tab, but souped up to handle your tasks, answer complex questions, navigate context shifts, and satisfy your curiosity all at once.

Perplexity pitches Comet as your “second brain,” capable of actively researching, comparing options, making purchases, briefing you for your day, and analyzing information on your behalf. The promise is that it does all this without ever sending you off on a wild hyperlink chase across 30 tabs, aiming to collapse “complex workflows into fluid conversations.”

“Agentic AI”

The capabilities of browsers like Comet point to the rapid evolution of agentic AI. This is a cutting-edge field where AI systems are designed not just to answer questions or generate text, but to autonomously perform a series of actions and make decisions to achieve a user’s stated goal. Instead of you telling the browser every single step, an agentic browser aims to understand your intent and execute multi-step tasks, effectively acting as an intelligent assistant within the web environment. “Comet learns how you think, in order to think better with you,” Perplexity says.

Comet’s launch throws Perplexity into direct confrontation with the biggest gatekeeper of the internet: Google Chrome. For decades, Chrome has been the dominant gateway, shaping how billions navigate the web. Every query, every click, every ad. It’s all been filtered through a system built to maximize user interaction and, consequently, ad revenue. Comet is trying to blow that model up, fundamentally challenging the advertising-driven internet economy.

And it’s not alone in this ambitious assault. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is reportedly preparing to unveil its own AI powered web browser as early as next week, according to Reuters. This tool will likely integrate the power of ChatGPT with Operator, OpenAI’s proprietary web agent. Launched as a research preview in January 2025, OpenAI’s Operator is an AI agent capable of autonomously performing tasks through web browser interactions. It leverages OpenAI’s advanced models to navigate websites, fill out forms, place orders, and manage other repetitive browser-based tasks.

Operator is designed to “look” at web pages like a human, clicking, typing, and scrolling, aiming to eventually handle the “long tail” of digital use cases. If integrated fully into an OpenAI browser, it could create a full-stack alternative to Google Chrome and Google Search in one decisive move. In essence, OpenAI is coming for Google from both ends: the browser interface and the search functionality.

Goodbye clicks. Hello cognition

Perplexity’s pitch is simple and provocative: the web should respond to your thoughts, not interrupt them. “The internet has become humanity’s extended mind, while our tools for using it remain primitive,” the company stated in its announcement, advocating for an interface as fluid as human thought itself.

Instead of navigating through endless tabs and chasing hyperlinks, Comet promises to run on context. You can ask it to compare insurance plans. You can ask it to summarize a confusing sentence or instantly find that jacket you forgot to bookmark. Comet promises to “collapse entire workflows” into fluid conversations, turning what used to be a dozen clicks into a single, intuitive prompt.

If that sounds like the end of traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the death of the familiar “blue links” of search results, that’s because it very well could be. AI browsers like Comet don’t just threaten individual publishers and their traffic; they directly threaten the very foundation of Google Chrome’s ecosystem and Google Search’s dominance, which relies heavily on directing users to external websites.

Google’s Grip is Slipping

Google Search has already been under considerable pressure from AI native upstarts like Perplexity and You.com. Its own attempts at deeper AI integration, such as the Search Generative Experience (SGE), have drawn criticism for sometimes producing “hallucinations” (incorrect information) and awkward summaries. Simultaneously, Chrome, Google’s dominant browser, is facing its own identity crisis. It’s caught between trying to preserve its massive ad revenue pipeline and responding to a wave of AI powered alternatives that don’t rely on traditional links or clicks to deliver useful information.

Comet doesn’t just sidestep the old ad driven model, it fundamentally breaks it. There’s no need to sort through 10 blue links. No need to open 12 tabs to compare specifications, prices, or user reviews. With Comet, you just ask, and let the browser do the work.

OpenAI’s upcoming browser could deepen that transformative shift even further. If it is indeed designed to keep user interactions largely inside a ChatGPT-like interface instead of linking out, it could effectively create an entirely new, self-contained information ecosystem. In such a future, Google Chrome would no longer be the indispensable gateway for knowledge or commerce.

What’s at Stake: Redefining the Internet

If Comet or OpenAI’s browser succeed, the impact won’t be limited to just disrupting search. They will fundamentally redefine how the entire internet works. Publishers, advertisers, online retailers, and even traditional software companies may find themselves disintermediated—meaning their direct connection to users is bypassed—by AI agents. These intelligent agents could summarize their content, compare their prices, execute their tasks, and entirely bypass their existing websites and interfaces.

It’s a new, high-stakes front in the war for how humans interact with information and conduct their digital lives. The AI browser is no longer a hypothetical concept. It’s here.

According to Bloomberg, Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff told employees in a recent presentation that AI is enhancing productivity across functions, including sales, customer service and software development, according to a person familiar with his remarks.

AI helped Microsoft save more than $500 million last year in its call centers alone and improved both employee and customer satisfaction, the person said.

The company is also using AI to manage interactions with smaller clients — an initiative that is still early-stage but already generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue, according to the same person.

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At the same time, Microsoft has announced job cuts of about 15,000 so far this year, with the latest round affecting customer-facing roles such as sales. The layoffs have raised concerns about AI displacing workers — a trend echoed across the technology sector.

Salesforce has relegated 30% of its internal work to AI, enabling it to reduce hiring for some positions.

Tech isn’t the only industry facing the potential impact of AI in the workplace. Ford, JPMorgan and other companies have warned of the possibility of deep job cuts as AI continues to advance.

Read more: Microsoft to Cut 3% of Workforce While Reducing Management Layers

Althoff said Microsoft’s AI tools, including its Copilot assistant, could make them more effective salespeople. He said each seller is finding more leads, closing deals quicker and generating 9% more revenue with Copilot’s help.

Microsoft said in April that its GitHub Copilot has 15 million users and noted that AI now generates 35% of the code for new products, helping speed up development.

Other technology companies are making similar moves: Executives at Alphabet and Meta have noted that AI is now responsible for writing substantial amounts of code.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Read more: Microsoft Cuts Nearly 9K Jobs in 2025’s 4th Round of Layoffs