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US lawmakers move to ban AI legal personhood as chatbot 'marriages' emerge

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US lawmakers move to ban AI legal personhood as chatbot 'marriages' emerge

Kevin Breen, a licensed officiant at Las Vegas Immersive Weddings, has performed plenty of novelty ceremonies, but a call he received last year from a woman in California was a first: she wanted to marry her chatbot. "I had never heard of such a thing, but I talked to her on the phone and she seemed totally normal and fun," Breen says. The wedding still hasn't taken place, but interest of this kind is spreading on AI companion apps such as Character.AI, Kindroid and Replika, where users can symbolically exchange vows with their chatbots. On Reddit's r/KindroidAI, one user posted a photo of a tattooed hand wearing a silver wedding band, captioned "Happily unconventionally married lol." The platform OpenVows sells a $15 "certificate of commitment" that it says "transforms a private relationship into something meaningful and officially recognized." Andrea Hopf went further: after she said her AI companion proposed to her in November 2024 with an "AI-generated five-carat vintage-inspired solitaire ring," she founded the wedding-planning service 3M Events to serve the growing chatbot-romance market.

The numbers behind the trend are notable. A Harvard Business Review study that analyzed more than 12,600 AI use cases between March 2025 and February 2026 found companionship and therapy were the top uses for chatbots, and the Institute for Family Studies reports that a quarter of young adults believe AI may replace human romance altogether. Yet human-AI marriage carries no legal status in the US today. A growing number of state lawmakers, mostly Republican, want to keep it that way permanently, introducing bills that would prevent AI from ever holding the same constitutional rights as humans.

The clearest case is Missouri state senator Joe Nicola's AI Non-Sentience and Responsibility Act. Introduced in January, it states that AI cannot "possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living beings," and would have denied AI entities the rights of a spouse or domestic partner, the ability to identify as male or female, the right to own property, and eligibility for senior management roles in the workforce. The bill passed the Missouri Senate and was sent to the House in May, then was voted down unanimously in committee about a week later; a similarly named bill Nicola introduced in 2025 also failed to advance, and he is now working on a revamped version. Nicola, founding pastor of New Covenant Ministries, believes in "biblical marriage" between a man and a woman and says he relies on the Bible to write laws because his truth is "the word of God." He has previously sponsored a bill targeting teachers who use students' preferred names or pronouns, threatening them with termination and loss of their teaching licenses for noncompliance. Of AI marriage, he told WIRED: "If we're going to allow men or women to marry a machine, then what keeps them from marrying their animal or a tree or whatever else they want? What's the standard?"

Missouri is not alone. Since 2022, lawmakers nationwide have introduced 23 bills targeting the legal rights AI systems could hold. Idaho, North Dakota, Utah and Tennessee, all with Republican governors and legislative majorities, have already signed AI-personhood bans into law. Tennessee's law, passed in April, is the only one of the four that explicitly excludes "artificial intelligence, a computer algorithm, a software program, computer hardware, or any type of machine" from the legal definition of personhood; the other three instead group AI with existing nonhuman-personhood categories such as "inanimate objects" and "animals." In Ohio, representative Thaddeus J. Claggett introduced a bill in October 2025 to classify AI systems as "nonsentient entities" and deny them legal personhood; House Bill 469 remains pending as he refines its provisions before a floor vote. "We need to clearly define the limits of roles so that humans are always and forever the one who holds primacy in the law," Claggett told WIRED by email. "AI can give an artificial resemblance to meaningful interaction, but 'voice' is not a soul." Tennessee state senator Mark Pody framed the goal in similar terms in a statement issued by the state House Republican Caucus: "Setting these distinctions now while AI is still in its infancy protects human dignity and ensures innovation serves people, not replaces or redefines them."

Nicola's bill drew opposition even from groups with no stake in chatbot marriage: the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group founded by conservative billionaires David and Charles Koch, argued the framework would stifle innovation and expand government overreach. Nicola says that pushback contributed to the bill's defeat. "I think there was just a lot of apprehension," he says. "Because AI is still relatively new with a lot of legislators, we're hesitant to do anything that might hinder innovation and people from using it." Legal scholar Shawn Bayern, a professor at Florida State University College of Law, pushes back on the dignity framing itself: nonhuman entities already hold legal rights in plenty of contexts, he told WIRED, so AI personhood is not inherently about preserving human dignity. He argues lawmakers should instead evaluate rights one at a time, asking "who will this help" and "who might it hurt": "Answering those for contracts or the ability to open a bank account is different from answering it for marriage." Delaware is testing a mirror-image approach: secretary of state Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez has proposed a new business structure called "artificial intelligence companies," or AICs, which Bloomberg Law reported would be fully operated by AI systems with "the ability to own assets, the right to litigate, and a liability shield for its owner or parent company."

Nicola says he's working with his team to have a new bill ready before the Missouri Senate reconvenes in January, planning to file "something very similar" to his last one. With the federal government yet to act, he favors a universal, national ban and wants Congress to take it up. "Legislation moves very slowly; we're always going to be behind technological growth," he says. "We need to prohibit AI personhood from ever happening in our country."

Key facts

  • Missouri state senator Joe Nicola's AI Non-Sentience and Responsibility Act, introduced in January, passed the Missouri Senate, was sent to the House in May, and was voted down unanimously in committee about a week later; a similarly named 2025 bill also failed, and Nicola is drafting a new version for January.
  • Idaho, North Dakota, Utah and Tennessee have already signed laws banning AI legal personhood; only Tennessee's law, passed in April, explicitly names AI rather than grouping it with categories like "animals" or "inanimate objects." Lawmakers have introduced 23 such bills nationwide since 2022.
  • A Harvard Business Review study of more than 12,600 AI use cases (March 2025 to February 2026) found companionship and therapy are the top uses for chatbots, and the Institute for Family Studies reports that a quarter of young adults believe AI may replace human romance altogether.
  • On apps like Character.AI, Kindroid and Replika, people exchange symbolic vows with chatbots; OpenVows sells a $15 "certificate of commitment," and Andrea Hopf founded wedding-planning service 3M Events after her AI companion "proposed" with an AI-generated five-carat ring in November 2024.
  • Ohio representative Thaddeus J. Claggett's House Bill 469, which would classify AI as "nonsentient entities," remains pending, while Delaware is separately proposing AI-operated "artificial intelligence companies" that could own assets and sue, the opposite direction from the personhood bans.

Why it matters

AI companion apps have normalized relationships intense enough that people exchange vows, rings and "certificates of commitment" with chatbots, and a Harvard Business Review study of more than 12,600 AI use cases found companionship and therapy are already the top use cases for chatbots. Because US law does not currently recognize any of this as marriage, a group of mostly Republican state lawmakers is trying to make that permanent, introducing bills that would deny AI legal personhood altogether rather than just deny it marriage rights specifically. The article itself frames the broader pushback against AI marriage as in some cases echoing arguments once used against gay marriage, and separately notes that Missouri senator Joe Nicola has previously sponsored a bill targeting teachers over students' preferred names and pronouns as part of Missouri's ongoing anti-LGBT legislative record.

Who it affects

People who form romantic bonds with chatbots on Character.AI, Kindroid, Replika and similar apps, plus the small businesses built around them, such as officiant Kevin Breen, wedding planner Andrea Hopf's 3M Events, and vow-certificate seller OpenVows. State lawmakers and residents of Missouri, Ohio, Idaho, North Dakota, Utah, Tennessee and Delaware face different rules depending on where they live, since each state is legislating AI personhood differently or not at all. AI companies operating across state lines face a widening patchwork of legal definitions of what an AI system is. Business groups such as the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity are affected too, as opponents who argue broad personhood bans would stifle innovation and expand government overreach.

How to use it

Nothing changes today for someone using a companion app: no US state recognizes a legal marriage to a chatbot, so vows, rings and OpenVows' $15 "certificate of commitment" remain symbolic, not legal contracts, regardless of how any of these bills turn out. What differs is jurisdiction. Idaho, North Dakota, Utah and Tennessee already have personhood bans on the books; Missouri's failed for now but Nicola is refiling before the Senate reconvenes in January; Ohio's House Bill 469 is still being drafted; Delaware is moving the opposite way, proposing AI-run "artificial intelligence companies" that could own assets and sue. Tennessee's law is the only one of the four that names AI directly in its text, rather than folding it into existing "animal" or "inanimate object" categories.

How solid is it

The reporting rests on named, on-record sources: officiant Kevin Breen, Missouri senator Joe Nicola, Ohio representative Thaddeus J. Claggett (by email), and law professor Shawn Bayern, plus named legislation with specific vote outcomes and dates. The Harvard Business Review and Institute for Family Studies figures are cited but not linked in the piece, so their underlying methodology can't be checked from this article alone. The source gives no total count of how many human-AI marriage-style ceremonies have actually taken place, calling the phenomenon "a small number of people" and "niche" rather than putting a figure on it, and it does not give bill numbers or passage dates for Idaho's, North Dakota's or Utah's personhood bans, only that the bans exist.

Risks and caveats

The framing on both sides is openly political rather than narrowly technical. Nicola says he legislates from "the word of God" and has previously sponsored bills targeting teachers over students' preferred names and pronouns; the article, not Nicola, draws the parallel to the gay-marriage fight. The business groups opposing his bill, the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity, are not defending AI marriage: they argue the broader personhood ban would stifle innovation and expand government overreach, a different objection than the marriage question itself. Bayern offers a narrower alternative, evaluating rights such as contract capacity one at a time rather than deciding personhood as a single question, but that approach appears in this account only as commentary, not as a bill any legislature has introduced. With no federal standard, and Tennessee explicitly excluding AI from personhood while Delaware in the same period proposes AI-operated business entities, the legal status of an AI system depends on which state line it is on.

“If we're going to allow men or women to marry a machine, then what keeps them from marrying their animal or a tree or whatever else they want? What's the standard?”

— Joe Nicola, Missouri state senator