- Tech News & Insight
- February 17, 2026
- Hema Kadia
The UK government signalled a rapid escalation of online safety measures that will bring AI chatbots squarely under the Online Safety Act and could introduce an under‑16 social media ban as early as this year. Ministers plan to amend the Online Safety Act 2023 so one‑to‑one interactions with AI systems fall within scope of illegal and harmful content controls. The government wants providers of large language model (LLM) assistants and agentic chatbots to implement safety‑by‑design, including stronger filtering, red‑teaming, abuse detection, and rapid takedown procedures for sexualised or otherwise illegal outputs.




