The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee voted on August 5, 2026, to advance the latest version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, clearing the bill for a possible vote by the full Senate (Engadget). This is the furthest the bill has gotten in the current Congress and brings back a proposal that previously stalled when the House and Senate could not agree on the details.

KOSA was introduced as S.1748 on May 14, 2025, by Senator Marsha Blackburn and co-sponsored by Senator Richard Blumenthal, and was sent to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (Congress.gov). The bill would require online platforms, including social media services, to build in tools and safeguards designed to protect children and teenagers. On July 29, 2026, Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz announced a committee markup — a session where lawmakers review and revise a bill before voting on it — which Ranking Member Maria Cantwell addressed in her opening statement (Commerce Committee — Republican, Commerce Committee — Democratic).

The Senate version of KOSA includes what is called a "duty of care" provision. That means online platforms would have a legal responsibility to reduce harm from content that promotes sexual exploitation, eating disorders, and similar categories. The bill also says social media apps must give children and teens ways to turn off addictive features, such as the recommendation systems that choose what content to show based on what keeps a person scrolling (Engadget). Cantwell's markup statement also noted that the bill sets privacy rules for data that chatbots collect from minors and bans advertising to minors (Commerce Committee — Democratic).

The House of Representatives passed its own youth online safety legislation on June 29, 2026 (Reuters). That bill, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act or KIDS Act, is designated H.R.7757. It bundles KOSA with COPPA 2.0, an update to the 1998 law that first set rules for children's privacy online, and would require companies to offer ways for children to limit addictive features and to put policies in place protecting children (Engadget, Congress.gov). The Congressional Research Service confirmed on August 3 that the bill requires certain online platforms to take steps promoting the safety of minors (CRS).

The House-passed version differs from the Senate's in one important way: it does not include the duty of care provision that the Senate's version contains (Engadget). That gap is the same kind of disagreement that killed KOSA in the previous Congress, when the Senate passed the bill with strong bipartisan support in July 2024 only for it to be dropped because the two chambers could not agree on the details (Reuters, Commerce Committee — Democratic).

KOSA has drawn support from a notable group of technology companies. OpenAI, Apple, Microsoft, X, and Snap have backed the bill, and some of those companies contributed to the Senate's wording (Engadget). X's involvement reportedly helped senators refine the language to address concerns that the bill could be used to silence speech (Engadget).

Opposition remains organized and vocal. Industry group NetChoice and digital rights organizations have argued that the bill could be used to censor speech and endanger user privacy (Engadget). Fight for the Future, which opposed the bill, argued that a duty of care enforced by a Trump FTC would function as a "censorship and surveillance nightmare," particularly for LGBTQ+ youth (Fight for the Future. The ACLU has opposed KOSA and similar bills that push for age verification, warning that checking whether someone is a minor threatens privacy and could force people to hand over sensitive personal information. Jenna Leventoff, the ACLU's senior policy counsel, said that bills requiring age verification "would not deliver safety but would put people's sensitive data at risk" (Engadget).

This tension is not new to anyone who has watched online safety legislation develop over the past two decades. COPPA, enacted in 1998, set up the basic framework for children's privacy online, and proposals since then have consistently faced the same problem: how to confirm that a user is underage without building a system for checking identities that itself becomes a privacy risk. KOSA's duty of care makes that problem sharper by creating a legal obligation on platforms, which the House's version leaves out entirely.

The fact that major tech companies with very different approaches to content moderation are lining up behind the same regulation is worth pausing on. When competitors agree on a rule, it often means the industry sees following that rule as manageable, or at least better than dealing with a patchwork of different state laws. Several states have already passed their own youth online safety measures, and a single federal standard, even a strict one, can be simpler to comply with than fifty different sets of rules.

The path forward has two steps. The Senate must schedule and hold a vote by the full chamber, where the broad bipartisan support the bill had in 2024 suggests passage is possible. Then the House and Senate would need to work out the differences between their versions, either through a joint committee or by one chamber accepting the other's text. The duty of care disagreement is the most visible divide, but the House's decision to bundle KOSA with COPPA 2.0 adds another layer of difficulty. Whether this Congress can resolve those differences where the last one could not will determine whether KOSA reaches the president's desk.