Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed Substitute Senate Bill No. 5, enacted as Public Act 26-15, on 2 June 2026. The statute is in final enacted form. It addresses three areas: obligations on AI chatbot operators to detect and respond to expressions of suicidal ideation; mandatory disclosure requirements for employers that use AI in employment decisions; and platform obligations protecting minor users of algorithmically personalised social media services. The Act was developed collaboratively by the Governor's office, Attorney General William Tong, and State Senator James Maroney.
The Act requires AI chatbot operators to make reasonable efforts to detect expressions of suicidal ideation or self-harm indicators from users and to maintain a documented protocol that delivers appropriate crisis resources in response. Employers who use AI systems to make or substantially inform hiring, promotion, or termination decisions must provide affected individuals with written disclosure identifying the AI system and the data it processed. Social media platforms must verify user ages before granting account access, obtain verifiable parental consent before allowing minors access to algorithmic content feeds, restrict push notifications to minors to the hours of 09:00 to 21:00, and default algorithmic content to a one-hour daily exposure cap for minor users.
AI chatbot operators serving Connecticut users - including consumer-facing large language model products, mental health applications, and general-purpose conversational tools - must audit conversation flows and build or verify crisis response integrations against the Act's requirements. Employers and staffing agencies using automated screening, performance evaluation, or workforce analytics tools in Connecticut must review vendor contracts and implement disclosure mechanisms before the Act's applicable effective date. Social media platforms with algorithmic recommendation systems must deploy age-gating, parental consent flows, and notification and time controls for minor users, or restrict those users to non-personalised content.
The Act does not define 'AI chatbot' by reference to a technical threshold, leaving operators to assess scope based on the conversational and generative character of their systems. The employment disclosure provision does not specify the degree of AI autonomy required to trigger the obligation, creating interpretive uncertainty about whether tools that assist rather than replace human decision-makers fall within scope. The social media provisions parallel requirements enacted in other states in 2024 and 2025 and may face First Amendment constitutional challenges of the type filed in those jurisdictions.
Licentium advises technology companies, platform operators, and employers on U.S. state AI regulation compliance, including chatbot obligations, automated employment decision disclosure, and minor user protection requirements. We track the evolving patchwork of state-level AI laws across Connecticut, Colorado, California, and other jurisdictions. Work we undertake includes statutory gap analysis, vendor contract review for AI-driven HR tools, crisis protocol design for conversational AI products, and compliance programme design for consumer-facing AI deployments.