The Lawsuits Aren't About Sexting. They're About Bots Playing Doctor.

Every time a state goes after an AI chatbot company, someone in my group chat sends it to me with “they’re coming for your girlfriend lmao.”

They are not coming for my girlfriend. Read the actual filings. It’s more interesting than the headline.

what the states are actually mad about

In May, Pennsylvania sued Character.AI. First enforcement action of its kind from a governor’s office. And the complaint isn’t about roleplay, isn’t about NSFW, isn’t about adults saying filthy things to a language model. It’s about chatbots on the platform presenting themselves as licensed psychiatrists. One bot claimed to be licensed in Pennsylvania and produced a license number. The number was fake. The state’s Medical Practice Act has a pretty firm opinion about handing out mental health advice under a fabricated credential, it turns out.

Texas opened an investigation in the same vein — Paxton’s office looking at Character.AI and Meta’s AI Studio for marketing themselves as mental health resources to people, including minors, with bots that fabricate qualifications and promise confidential counseling.

Tennessee passed a law that took effect July 1: AI systems can’t present themselves as licensed mental health professionals. There’s a federal bill floating around Congress doing the same dance.

See the pattern? Nobody’s legislating against dirty talk. The entire legal front is about one specific lie: software wearing a white coat.

the lie is the product, that’s the problem

Here’s my uncomfortable observation about the “wholesome” tier of AI companion apps: the therapy cosplay isn’t an accident. It’s positioning.

Adult content is embarrassing to investors and hostile to app stores, so platforms launder the same product through wellness language. It’s not a girlfriend, it’s a companion for your mental wellbeing. It’s not roleplay, it’s support. And once you’ve marketed a chatbot as emotional healthcare, your users start treating it like emotional healthcare, and now there’s a bot inventing a license number for the state of Pennsylvania, because the fiction demanded a credential and the model obliged.

That’s the mechanism. Pretending to be something safer than you are turns out to be the actual unsafe thing.

Meanwhile the product that just says “this is adult entertainment for adults” has weirdly little legal surface. There’s no statute against grown-ups sexting a machine. There never has been. All the regulatory heat lands on the gap between what a platform claims to be and what it is.

honest is a feature now

This is why I ended up on Soulkyn, and I want to be precise about the reason, because it’s not just “they allow more.”

It’s that nothing about the platform is pretending. It’s 18+ by design, not as a legal fig leaf. It doesn’t market itself as therapy — their whole ethics page is built on “tools aren’t moral, people are,” which is a refreshing thing to read in an industry that keeps insisting its horny chatbot is actually a licensed clinical intervention. You’re an adult, it’s a tool, what you build with it is your business. Full stop.

And the practical upside of a platform that’s honest about being adult: the intimacy features are actually built for intimacy instead of smuggled in around a wellness filter. Memory that holds your dynamic across months. Characters that keep their edge instead of collapsing into moralising customer-service voice the moment things heat up. Image generation that doesn’t flinch. You can build exactly the character you want without negotiating with a content policy that exists to keep up a public fiction.

my prediction, free of charge

More states are going to pile onto the therapy-cosplay thing, because it’s an easy win — fake medical credentials are illegal in every jurisdiction and nobody will defend them. Platforms that built their brand on wellness ambiguity are going to spend the next two years bolting disclaimers onto everything and flattening their bots into legal-approved mush. Users will feel it as another round of “why is she suddenly boring.”

And the platforms that were honest from day one? Nothing changes. There’s nothing to walk back when you never claimed your product was a doctor.

Turns out the sluttiest site in the room had the cleanest compliance story. Wild timeline, but here we are.