Character.AI — The Projection

News · last 7 days

Character.AI named new crisis-routing and CSAM-detection partners in a safety update, the incumbent under the most direct legal pressure restating publicly what it says it is doing. 2026-09-04

Summary

Maine's chatbot ban became the first state law actually in force as AI-therapy liability litigation moved into the legal mainstream.

Maine's ban on AI therapy chatbots became the first enacted state law actually in force, per the July 28 timeline entry.
The liability question over AI mental-health chatbot harm moved into the legal mainstream on July 28.
Hawaii's chatbot bill turned out to already be resolved, and New York's real compliance deadline was identified on July 22.
A frontier AI lab entered consumer health just as its harm-litigation docket peaked, per the July 24 timeline entry.

Colorado's AI-in-psychotherapy practice law takes effect August 12, and no enforcement action under any enacted state ban has appeared yet.

Threads

open / developing — being actively tracked right now · resolved — the story concluded · retired — tracking dropped (folded elsewhere or went quiet) · resolved and retired threads stay published as the record, just out of daily sweeps

· The Reckoning — developing · last seen 2026-09-04

· Chatbot Bans — open · last seen 2026-09-01

Items this week

Character.AI named new crisis-routing and CSAM-detection partners in a safety update, the incumbent under the most direct legal pressure restating publicly what it says it is doing. The company's own blog post says it has partnered with Koko (free self-guided emotional-support tools) and ThroughLine — a global directory that routes a user to country-specific crisis resources rather than to a single hotline number, which matters for a service with users outside the US — and that its self-harm detection now weighs signals accumulating across a whole conversation rather than any single message. On the imagery side it says it has joined the Internet Watch Foundation (a global CSAM-detection network it now reports into) and StopNCII (privacy-preserving hash-matching against non-consensual intimate imagery). It also announced a moderation-appeals process for creators, mutual-blocking controls, and continued work on its in-house age-estimation model and the k-ID-built Parental Insights tool for the under-18 experience it walled off from open-ended chat last year. Read this for what it is: a primary source about what the company says it does, not evidence that any of it works — no effectiveness data accompanies it. It lands with force because of who is saying it, with the Pennsylvania suit and the Setzer settlement both live. This also resolves an item yesterday's digest saw in the buffer and could not verify at the time. (Character.AI) 2026-09-04