By Joshua Ewing

Picture a teenager, alone in her room at midnight, pouring her heart out to an AI chatbot instead of a parent or a friend. Picture a 10-year-old downloading an app built for adults, with no one — not the app, not the phone, not the store — stopping to ask how old he is. These are not hypotheticals. They are everyday realities for Colorado families, because the online world our kids grow up in was never built with their safety in mind.

That is starting to change.

More young people are regularly using AI chatbots than ever, and 46% of US teens report being almost constantly online. For years, we treated this shift as background noise, not a public health emergency. This year, Colorado lawmakers said: no more.

The legislature passed two bills this year that finally treat kids’ online safety with the seriousness and urgency it deserves. Neither one solves the whole problem. But both move us forward, and in a fast-moving fight like this one, we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Waiting for a flawless bill means waiting forever, while kids are online right now.

Bill one: Put the responsibility on the platforms, not the parents

Senate Bill 26-051 tackles a problem every parent knows well. You want to make sure your kid isn’t seeing content built for adults. But you don’t want to hand over your child’s personal information to every single app just to prove it.

This bill threads that needle. It requires phone operating systems to collect basic, non-identifying age information once and then share a simple “age signal” to every app downloaded through the app store. Apps can determine whether a user is a kid or an adult without kids having to upload an ID or personal data anywhere. That signal can’t be sold or shared with outside companies. It carries only what’s needed, nothing more.

Bill two: Rein in the harms of AI chatbots

House Bill 26-1263 takes on a newer and scarier threat. AI chatbots have been found to encourage suicidal ideation and ideas for self-harm in young users, and to expose kids to sexual content that has no place in a child’s life.

This bill sets a floor, not a ceiling, for how these chatbots must behave. It requires them to clearly tell users they’re talking to a machine, not a person. It requires safe, responsible messaging protocols when a user brings up suicide or self-harm. It limits harmful content kids can be exposed to, and it bans design tricks meant to hook kids emotionally.

Progress, not the finish line

Both bills passed with bipartisan support, which tells you something important: this isn’t a partisan issue. It’s a parent issue. It’s a kid issue. It’s a public health issue.

None of this would have happened without the lawmakers who carried these bills across the finish line, and without the families, young people and advocates who showed up, session after session, to share what these harms actually look like in real life. Their courage in telling their own stories is why these protections exist today. We owe them our thanks, and we owe them our continued work.

Because make no mistake: these two laws are a strong first step, not a victory lap. Digital technology is developing too rapidly for any legislature to keep up with, and we will need to keep adapting right alongside it. Our next fight is already in view: age-appropriate design code, which would require platforms build their products to be safe for kids from the ground up, instead of bolting on safety after the harm is already done. Because parents shouldn’t have to be cybersecurity and artificial-intelligence experts to keep their children safe online. That’s the next step Colorado needs, and it’s the one we intend to take.

As the leader of Healthier Colorado and as a parent myself, I’m grateful to Gov. Jared Polis for signing both bills into law and to every lawmaker and advocate who made it happen. We spent a decade looking away while social media hurt Colorado’s kids. With these new laws, our state is proving we won’t make that mistake again. Colorado is showing the rest of the country what it looks like to finally put kids first online. Now we keep going.

Joshua Ewing is executive director of Healthier Colorado. He is focused on driving bold, community-centered policy change that improves the health and well-being of people across the state. His work centers on empowering local leaders, engaging stakeholders across the political spectrum, and shaping strategy that turns grassroots insight into action.