Bolstering Online Transparency, California Business and Professions Code sections 17940 to 17943
Any person using a bot to communicate with another person online in California. There is no user threshold on who is caught — the ten-million-visitor figure that appears in most summaries defines a separate term used only to exempt web hosts and internet service providers. A one-person business running a sales chatbot on a low-traffic site is inside the section. The real limit is intent: the bot must be deployed to mislead about its artificial identity in order to incentivise a sale or influence a vote.
- 01If your bot is deployed to drive a sale or influence a vote and could mislead someone into thinking it is a person, disclose that it is a bot.
- 02Make that disclosure clear, conspicuous, and reasonably designed to inform the people it interacts with.
- 01Nothing. The duty is on whoever uses the bot. Service providers of online platforms, including hosts and internet service providers, are expressly exempt.
- 01You do not have to be a large platform to be caught. The ten-million-user threshold is an exemption for infrastructure providers, not a limit on scope. Most published summaries of this law get that backwards.
- 02It does not reach support bots, booking bots or answer bots that are not trying to pass as human to close a sale.
- 03No specific wording, placement, font or permanent banner is prescribed.
- 04No duty to disclose that content was AI-generated. No registration, filing or record-keeping.
- 05No private right of action, and the chapter names no enforcing agency and sets no penalty.
None specified. The chapter contains no fine, no penalty and no designated regulator. Disclosure is a complete defence.
We run no sales bot in California. Included because it is widely cited to small businesses as a compliance burden, and read against its own text it imposes a single sentence of disclosure with no penalty attached.
“A person using a bot shall not be liable under this section if the person discloses that it is a bot.”
Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17941(a)