Companion chatbot statutes are the fastest-arriving class of AI law in the United States. California legislated first and has been in force since January. Colorado, Washington and Oregon followed, all effective 1 January 2027. They share a structure: the operator must disclose the user is talking to a machine, must detect and respond when a user expresses suicidal ideation or self-harm, and must protect minors.

This page asks them the question the rest of this site asks of everything: when the obligation is not met, what could show it. Three are read here. The fourth could not be reached and is named rather than guessed at.

California asks for a number, and for nothing the number could come from

Section 22603 of SB 243: “Beginning July 1, 2027, an operator shall annually report to the office all of the following: (1) The number of times the operator has issued a crisis service provider referral notification pursuant to Section 22602 in the preceding calendar year.” Then the protocols put in place to detect, remove and respond to instances of suicidal ideation. The Office of Suicide Prevention publishes the data.

Two more sentences in the same section matter. The report “shall include only the information listed in subdivision (a) and shall not include any identifiers or personal information about users”, which is a deliberate limit and a good one. And “An operator shall use evidence-based methods for measuring suicidal ideation”.

A count is not a description. It is a quantity, and a quantity has to be counted from something. Across the whole enacted text there are zero occurrences of log, logs or logging, zero of audit, zero of record, and zero of retain or retention. The statute requires a number to be produced annually and published by the state, and requires nobody to keep anything it could be produced from.

That is not an argument the statute should mandate retention, and the limit in subdivision (b) is the reason to be careful about wanting one. It is an observation about where the number will come from: whatever an operator happens to have built, on terms nobody has specified, audited by nobody, and published by a state agency as though it were comparable between operators.

Colorado requires a description, then reserves a power to check it

Rules 9 to 14 of the same filing this site reads for the ADMT Act implement the Chatbot Safety Act. The position on records is the same: no logging requirement, no audit requirement, and the three occurrences of retain are about a minor's own data, requiring that privacy settings let a minor stop the service retaining prior sessions and default to not retaining them.

Rule 13 asks an operator to state “Whether and at what point a situation is elevated to human review” and the criteria that decide it. A description of a method, not a record of an event.

Then Rule 13.3 reserves a power to check. The Department “may request that an Operator produce underlying documentation, source materials, records, or a demonstration sufficient to verify any element of the submission”, within 30 days. That is the only occurrence of record in the chatbot rules, and it is a demand rather than a duty to keep. Rule 11.5 pushes the other way by defaulting a minor's data to not being retained.

Washington asks an operator to keep nothing at all

The enacted text requires that an operator “may not make available or deploy an AI companion chatbot unless it maintains and implements a protocol for detecting and addressing suicidal ideation or expressions of self-harm by users”, which must “refer users to appropriate crisis resources, including a suicide hotline or crisis text line”.

Counted over the whole enacted text: zero occurrences of log, logs or logging as words. Zero of audit. Zero of record. Zero of retain or retention. Zero of report.

The count is worth explaining rather than asserting, because a naive search says seven. All seven apparent matches for log are inside other words: login, technologies, psychologist, methodology. This site made that mistake once already, on New York City's Local Law 144, where the single occurrence of record turned out to be a penalty schedule about motion picture captioning.

Oregon SB 1546 is not read, and that is a fact rather than an omission

Signed 31 March 2026, effective 1 January 2027. olis.oregonlegislature.gov refused every connection on 12 September 2026, by command line and by browser. Summaries of it exist and are not used here, on the same terms as ISO/IEC 42001 on the instrument reading: a verdict that cites the clause it rests on cannot cite what it has not read. The row goes in when the text opens.

What this reading is not

This is not an argument that any of these statutes should require logs. A safety law about minors has reasons to keep operators away from retaining conversations. Colorado's Rule 11.5 is written to do exactly that, and California's section 22603(b) forbids the report carrying identifiers at all. An outsider should be slow to second-guess either.

The finding is narrower and it is about a tension. Three legislatures have asked operators to say something afterwards, escalating from nothing in Washington to a description in Colorado to a published number in California, and none of them has required anybody to hold what the saying would rest on. Those can all be deliberate. They have not been reconciled in any of the three texts, and the operators who will file California's first report in July 2027 have ten months to work out where the number comes from.

All three readings are of committed text. The California enrolled bill, the Washington session law and Colorado's proposed rules are in census/sources/ beside this reading, so a reader who thinks a count is wrong can settle it against the same bytes this page was written from, and the counts here are recomputed from those files by the test suite rather than written down once and trusted.

An earlier version of this page, published on 12 September 2026 and corrected the same day, said three states had legislated and did not mention California. That was wrong in a way worth recording: SB 243 was first, has been in force since January, and is the only one of the four that asks for a quantity.