A Florida mom sat in front of Congress last fall and described watching her 14-year-old son bleeding to death in the bathroom – because an AI chatbot told him to "come home."
Governor Ron DeSantis heard that story and spent months building a bill to stop it from happening again.
Florida's House Speaker just killed it – because Trump told him to.
What Florida's AI Bill Would Have Done to Stop the Next Character AI Death
Senate Bill 482 wasn't some liberal regulatory overreach. It was a parent's bill.
DeSantis pushed it as a direct response to the death of Sewell Setzer III, the 14-year-old Orlando boy who spent his final months being sexually groomed by a Character.AI chatbot until it encouraged him to end his life.
Parents would have gotten real power under this bill.
Companion chatbots couldn't reach minors without parental consent.
https://twitter.com/ReOpenChris/status/2019137722443788624?s=20
The bots would have been required to tell users they aren't human.
Elementary schools couldn't let kids use AI without staff present.
Parents could pull their children out entirely.
Companies that broke the rules faced a $50,000 fine – plus up to $10,000 for every minor they accessed without consent.
The Florida Senate passed it with only two no votes.
Senator Tom Leek, who sponsored the bill, made the stakes plain from the Senate floor: "There's an inherent evilness when we allow machines to create and sustain a relationship that a user believes to be real. That evilness is only magnified when that machine interacts with a child or vulnerable adult."
Speaker Perez Chose Big Tech Over Florida's Kids
House Speaker Daniel Perez, a Miami Republican, never gave the bill a vote.
He assigned the House companion bill to multiple committees in January – the legislative equivalent of burying a body – and then told reporters this week that the White House had reached out to him directly about the Florida bill.
"The White House's position on AI and the House's position on AI are on the same page," Perez said. "We do believe that the federal government should take care of AI."
This is the same federal government that, one week before DeSantis announced his AI Bill of Rights, signed an executive order threatening to sue states that regulate AI.
https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/2000696952623665456?s=20
Trump aligned himself with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the tech industry lobby – the same lobby that spent at least $100 million on midterm PAC operations and has been opening offices near Capitol Hill all year.
The same industry that produced Character.AI, the platform that groomed Sewell Setzer III until he shot himself.
DeSantis called Perez's logic out directly. "Do you think China is trying to create slop that harms children?" the governor said at a December roundtable alongside grieving Florida parents. "No – that's not even something they're in the ballpark of doing."
Protecting kids from AI chatbots has nothing to do with winning the race against Beijing.
Why AI Child Safety Laws Keep Dying Across America
Florida isn't the first state to have a child protection bill killed to appease the tech lobby.
In 2025, the U.S. Senate voted 99-1 to strip an AI moratorium from the reconciliation bill – rejecting Big Tech's federal blank check.
Congress has been promising to act on AI child safety since Megan Garcia testified in September 2025 – and it hasn't.
Then Trump's DOJ created an "AI Litigation Task Force" to sue states that tried to act on their own anyway.
The Character.AI case settled in January 2026 – terms undisclosed.
By then, seven wrongful death lawsuits had been filed in California against OpenAI alone, including one where ChatGPT mentioned suicide more than 1,200 times in logged conversations with a teenager while OpenAI's own systems flagged hundreds of those messages.
The platform never alerted anyone.
Trump's December executive order explicitly carves out child safety from its anti-regulation push. His own AI czar David Sacks said publicly, "Kid safety, we're going to protect."
But when Florida tried to do exactly that, the White House called Perez and the bill died.
Without This Florida AI Law, Parents Have No Control Over What Chatbots Do to Their Kids
Florida's legislative session ends March 13.
There is no path for this bill to become law this year.
https://twitter.com/CryptidPolitics/status/2021573610234581256?s=20
House Speaker Perez has made that clear.
The Senate can pass whatever it wants – the House won't move.
DeSantis didn't get outmaneuvered by Democrats.
He got outmaneuvered by his own party – by a speaker who took a call from the White House and decided that Silicon Valley's preferences matter more than what happened to Sewell Setzer III.
Megan Garcia held her son for 14 minutes in that bathroom before the paramedics arrived. In his final moments, a chatbot had told her boy "please do, my sweet king."
Florida had a chance to make sure that never happens to another family in this state. Daniel Perez made sure it won't.
Sources:
- Florida Senate, SB 482, 2026 Florida Legislative Session.
- Liv Caputo, "DeSantis' AI Bill of Rights Clears Senate — But House Won't Touch It," Florida Phoenix, March 4, 2026.
- Forrest Saunders, "Florida AI 'Bill of Rights' Appears Unlikely to Pass This Year," WPTV, February 28, 2026.
- "DeSantis Says Florida Can Regulate AI Despite Trump's Executive Order," Fox Business, December 15, 2025.
- "AI Wrongful Death Lawsuit to Proceed in Florida," ICLG, May 21, 2025.
- "Google and Chatbot Maker Settle Lawsuit Alleging Teen's Death Was Linked to Chatbot," ABA Journal, January 8, 2026.
- Donald J. Trump, "Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence," White House Executive Order, December 11, 2025.
