California SB-243 AI Companion Chatbot disclosure on Magento, how to comply?

Yes, this is a brand-new compliance area for 2026 and we’re already shipping for it. California Senate Bill 243 (the AI Companion Chatbot Disclosure Act) took effect 1 January 2026 and applies to any AI chatbot accessible to California users, which means basically every Magento store running a support chatbot (Drift, Intercom, Tidio, Zendesk Answer Bot, OpenAI GPT-powered assistants). SB-243 has four core requirements. (1) Disclosure, the chatbot must clearly identify itself as an AI at the start of every conversation; we wire a per-storefront disclosure banner that fires on first chatbot interaction. (2) Age-gating, if the chatbot is accessible to minors, you must implement reasonable age-verification; we deploy a soft-gate (date-of-birth prompt) plus a hard-gate (Veratad ID-check) depending on risk profile. (3) Suicide / self-harm safety routing, the chatbot must detect crisis-language and route to live agent or 988 crisis line; we wire this via Drift/Intercom workflow triggers + Magento customer-flag escalation. (4) Conversation logging, transcripts must be retained 12 months for regulator audits; we deploy CCPA-compliant retention with auto-delete. Plus CCPA + CPRA data-subject rights apply.