EPIC Publishes Model Age-Appropriate Design Code Bill

In February 2026, the Electronic Privacy Information Center published a Model Age-Appropriate Design Code bill establishing privacy and online safety protections for minors, including provisions that give children agency over their online experiences, prohibit specific high-risk design practices, require large companies to evaluate design features for risk of compulsive use, and provide transparency for researchers, policymakers and users into corporate design practices. The model legislation is designed to guide state-level lawmakers crafting child protection statutes in the absence of comprehensive federal standards.

Design-code mandates, like those proposed in EPIC's model bill, create obligations around features but do not in themselves detect the real-time harms those features enable. A platform may disable infinite scroll or restrict contact from strangers yet still host direct-message exchanges in which a child is groomed, coerced or sextorted over hours or days. Guardii's anti-grooming, anti-sextortion and CSAM detection modules operate in parallel with design guardrails, identifying escalating predatory patterns in private conversations as they unfold across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, and surfacing a child in crisis to a parent, school counsellor or child-protection authority in time to intervene, addressing the underlying harm that design codes alone cannot reach.