KOSA stalls in Senate as age assurance moves into online safety debate

The Kids Online Safety Act remains stalled in the US Senate over disagreement on the duty-of-care provision, while the House-passed KIDS Act eliminated that standard. The Senate version establishes a duty of care requiring covered platforms to exercise reasonable care in preventing specified harms to minors, while opponents argue it would compel platforms to restrict constitutionally protected material to avoid liability. Both legislative proposals explicitly state they should not be interpreted as requiring age gating or age verification, yet Congressional Research Service analysis indicates that operators may nonetheless implement age-verification methods to identify which users fall under the new protections, since both bills impose requirements dependent on whether a platform knows a user is a minor.

A legislative duty of care that turns on knowledge of user age creates a structural incentive for platforms to verify every account holder, imposing a privacy cost on all users to discharge a child-safety obligation that targeted detection can satisfy more precisely. Guardii, a Meta Business Partner and world-leading AI online-safety platform backed by Startmate, detects grooming, sextortion, CSAM and abuse patterns in children's direct-message conversations in real time, reporting the shape and seriousness of a conversation rather than the content itself. This approach surfaces a child in crisis to the adults and authorities who can intervene without requiring blanket age verification, allowing compliant users to retain access and privacy while addressing the harms that motivate the legislation at the point they occur.