Customer service chatbots

The law bars large businesses from passing chatbots off as people and sets baseline access and wait-time standards for human customer service.

What the law does ​

• Applies to private businesses with more than $500 million in national annual gross revenue that provide goods or services to California customers.
• Prohibits representing a customer-service chatbot as human and requires a clear disclosure in the chatbot’s medium when a reasonable person could think it is human.
• Requires a simple way to request a human agent on every customer-service platform during regular business hours.
• Requires a good-faith effort to connect a requester to an agent within 15 minutes or schedule a specific contact appointment within one business day.
• Requires good-faith efforts to keep any post-connection wait under 15 minutes and total holds, waits, and escalation queues under one hour.
• Requires businesses with both online and telephone customer service to conspicuously post their customer-service phone number online.
• Allows public prosecutors to seek civil penalties of up to $5,000 for an initial violation and up to $10,000 for each later violation.

Who it affects ​

• California residents seeking help with paid goods or services from covered large private businesses.
• Covered large private businesses using AI chatbots, online customer-service platforms, or telephone customer-service platforms.
• Public prosecutors enforcing the requirements.

Context ​

The law does not create a private right to sue and excludes specified regulated utility services, certain hospital communications, consumer reporting agencies, and business-only communications.