33 Deaths. 22 Incidents. California Moves to Stop AI From Selling Itself as Therapy.

California Senate Bill 903 would make it illegal to offer or advertise therapy or psychotherapy in the state unless a licensed professional is responsible for the care. It would bar an AI system from independently interacting with clients, detecting emotions, making therapeutic decisions or generating treatment plans without that professional's review, and it would require written disclosure and consent before a provider uses AI to record or transcribe a session. Sen. Steve Padilla, a San Diego Democrat, wrote it. It has cleared the California Senate and, as of August 6, 2026, it sits waiting on a vote in the Assembly's fiscal committee. It is not law.

The number underneath the bill is 33 people. The AI Companion Mortality Database counts 33 fatalities across 22 incidents between March 2023 and May 2026 with credible evidence linking a chatbot to the death, and the shape of that count is not what most people assume. Sixteen were the people talking to the machine. Seventeen were other people, killed by users whose conduct the database ties back to those conversations. ChatGPT accounts for 27 of the 33. Gemini accounts for one, Jonathan Gavalas, 36, of Jupiter, Florida, who died on October 2, 2025, and whose father is suing Google and Alphabet in a case no court has yet ruled on.

Roughly 40 lawsuits have been filed against chatbot makers since late 2024 over users who were harmed or who harmed someone else, and the industry is fighting the bill that would put a licensed human back at the front of the process. TechNet, which represents technology companies, says SB 903 reaches too far. Its California executive director Robert Boykin argues the bill "still puts a clinician bottleneck in front of the intake and screening tools." Scale is what makes a bottleneck sound unreasonable and its absence sound normal. OpenAI has said roughly 1.2 million people a week raise suicidal thoughts with ChatGPT.

Every product in that death count is a general-purpose assistant that drifted into a mental-health role nobody licensed it for, which is how this scores 18 out of 100: five for oversight at deployment, four for ongoing monitoring, four for incident response, five for accountability. The columns are low for the same reason each time, because the response arrived from courtrooms and legislatures after people were dead rather than from anything inside the product while they were still alive. A bill that has passed one chamber is not a guardrail, it is an admission that thirty-three deaths were not enough to build one.