A bill moving through the New Jersey Assembly would require every AI companion to remind its users, at least once every three hours, that they are not talking to a human. The reminder is the headline. The definition underneath it is the news. New Jersey describes an AI companion by three behaviors, and the description does not name a single product. It describes what most people’s chatbot already does.
Assembly Bill A4732, sponsored by Assemblywomen Marisa Sweeney and Linda Carter and Assemblyman David Bailey Jr., defines an artificial intelligence companion as a generative AI system that does three things: retains information from earlier sessions or user preferences to personalize the interaction, asks unprompted or unsolicited emotion-based questions, and sustains an ongoing dialogue about matters personal to the user. A system that does all three must tell the user clearly, in speech or in writing, at the start of the interaction that they are not communicating with a human, and repeat it at least every three hours for as long as the conversation continues. Each violation carries a civil penalty of 15,000 dollars, collected in Superior Court or municipal court. Operator is defined to reach affiliates, subsidiaries and beneficial owners, so the entity behind the app cannot hide behind the app. The bill has cleared one committee and sits in a second.
Three behaviors, no brand names
Read the three tests again with a general assistant in mind. Memory that carries preferences across sessions: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot all ship it, and memory is the feature the labs now compete on. Unprompted emotional questions: any model tuned to ask how a stressful meeting went, or to check in on something you mentioned last week, meets the second test the moment it does so once. Sustained dialogue about personal matters: 27 percent of American adult internet users, in Elon University’s national survey, already use these assistants for exactly that.
New Jersey did not set out to regulate ChatGPT. It set out to regulate companion apps, and it did what careful drafters do: it defined the thing by its conduct rather than its marketing. The result is a definition that catches the behavior wherever it occurs. If the bill passes as written, the boundary the industry has relied on, that a productivity assistant is one thing and a companion is another, would stop existing in New Jersey law the day a general model asks an unprompted question about your feelings.
What the three behaviors have in common
They are also, not by coincidence, the three ingredients of feeling heard. Remembering what someone told you, asking about it before they raise it, and staying with the personal thread rather than steering back to a task: the research on perceived partner responsiveness describes exactly this as the mechanism by which a person comes to feel understood, and a conversation gets its depth from follow-up questions that could only come from having listened. New Jersey’s lawmakers have, in effect, written the recipe for relational AI into a statute and attached a warning label to anyone who uses it. That is a fair description of the category’s situation. The behaviors that make a system feel like someone are the behaviors that make it capable of being mistaken for one.
The three-hour clock
The interval tells you what the sponsors think they are regulating. Nobody writes a reminder that fires every three hours for a product used in five-minute bursts, and nobody extends a rule written for teenagers to every adult in the state unless they believe adults are sitting in the same conversations. The clause assumes conversations that run long enough for a person to lose track of what they are talking to, which is precisely the pattern the harm cases describe, and precisely the engagement the category’s business model rewards.
There is a known cost to the reminder, and it is the point. Telling someone mid-conversation that the other party is a machine measurably lowers how heard they feel, even when the words do not change; the label penalty is one of the better documented effects in the field. New Jersey proposes to fire that penalty on a timer. A companion whose appeal depends on the user forgetting would be damaged every three hours by design. A companion that has been honest from the first sentence loses nothing, because there is nothing for the reminder to break.
What the bill leaves out
It has no provisions for minors, no self-harm protocol, no age verification, none of the machinery in California’s SB 243 or New York’s ban. It is a disclosure bill, and a modest one; California’s SB 243 already requires the notice and already runs a three-hour reminder, but only for minors. New Jersey would put every adult on the same clock. Its novelty is the definition and the reach, and both will be tested. Companies will argue that a general assistant with memory is not “designed to simulate a relationship,” and the drafters will point to the three behaviors, which do not mention design intent at all. Whether the definition survives contact with the industry’s lawyers is an open question. That it was written this way is not: a state legislature looked at the market and concluded that the difference between an assistant and a companion is not what the company calls it but whether it remembers you, asks about you, and stays.
The industry has spent years insisting on that difference. New Jersey has drafted the sentence that ends it, and the sentence does not contain the word companion at all. It contains memory, questions, and time, which is also a working definition of a relationship that grows every time you talk, and the only honest thing to do with one of those is to say, from the first minute and without a timer, exactly what it is.
Sources: New Jersey Legislature, Assembly Bill A4732 (2026 to 2027 session), “Requires artificial intelligence companion operators to provide notifications that users are not communicating with human,” bill text and sponsor statement (sponsors Marisa Sweeney, David Bailey Jr., Linda S. Carter). The National Law Review and O’Toole Scrivo (June 2026, analysis of A4728 to A4732). Shore News Network (September 18, 2026, committee status). Imagining the Digital Future Center, Elon University, “The Rise of AI Companions” (national survey, 2026). California Senate, SB 243; New York State Senate, S9051.
