Tennessee is about to make building chatbots a Class A felony

mindcrime 29 points 9 comments April 15, 2026
old.reddit.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (7 comments)

sieste

Wow. > The bill makes it a Class A felony (15-25 years imprisonment) to “knowingly train artificial intelligence” to do ANY of the following: • Provide emotional support, including through open-ended conversations with a user • Develop an emotional relationship with, or otherwise act as a companion to, an individual • Simulate a human being, including in appearance, voice, or other mannerisms • Act as a sentient human or mirror interactions that a human user might have with another human user, such that an individual would feel that the individual could develop a friendship or other relationship with the artificial intelligence

xiphias2

It's against xAI Colossus datacenter in Memphis

miloignis

As some of the reddit comments point out, they've already backed off: https://www.wjhl.com/news/tennessee-backs-off-sweeping-artif...

jonah

But datacenters are fine? https://www.datacenters.com/locations/united-states/tennesse...

gerikson

Finally someone taking AGI x-risk seriously. cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5CfBDiQNg9upfipWk/only-law-c...

cozzyd

Since Oracle is moving to Nashville, I support this decision.

carefree-bob

We need to stop getting worked up about crazy legislation being proposed. That's a circus even at the Federal level as legislators propose all kinds of loony stuff to appeal to their base knowing full well it never has a chance to become law. It is extremely cheap to propose legislation, a very different matter to actually pass legislation that is signed into law. But when you write an article about legislation that is merely proposed at the state level, then that's really rage-baiting. And when you title this as "about to make" instead of "loony rep proposed something he knows will never stand a chance of passing his own chamber", then it's being downright dishonest.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
4,686 stories · 44,186 chunks indexed