EU Kids Act draft bars under-15s from social media, games and AI companions

The European Commission is preparing an EU Kids Act that would stop children under 15 from opening their own accounts on social media, video-sharing platforms, online games and AI chatbots, according to a draft seen by Reuters and a separate confidential text obtained by Euronews. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is expected to preview the plan in her State of the Union speech on Wednesday. The bill itself is due on Thursday, presented with tech commissioner Henna Virkkunen.

The Commission declined to comment when asked about the leak. The draft is still a proposal. It needs the Parliament and the Council before it binds any company. The political pressure behind it is already national. France, Greece, Austria, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands are all writing or considering their own age laws. Brussels wants one text so that a teenager in Lisbon and a teenager in Helsinki face the same gate.

The age ladder in the draft

Children under three would be barred from social media and other services the draft calls high-risk. From three to 13 they could use child-specific services under adult supervision. From 13 to 14 they could have introductory accounts on social media and video platforms, opened by a parent, with limited contacts and strict time caps. From 15 they could open their own accounts. Euronews described the under-15 rule as a ban on creating accounts without parental approval rather than a total network block for every 14-year-old already online.

The scope is wider than a Facebook-and-TikTok bill. Spain and the Netherlands asked last week to bring video games and AI companions into the file. The draft now treats those companions as virtual tools that can give mental-health and personal-development advice to minors, and therefore as services that need the same age gate as a social feed. Safety-by-design duties would sit on all of those products, with the weight of the duty scaled to the service type and the age of the user.

Who pays for enforcement

Companies would pay a supervisory fee to fund the regulators who will police the rules. That line matters more than the recital about child safety. Age-assurance at EU scale is expensive. So is checking that an AI companion does not give a 12-year-old medical instructions. A fee shifts that cost onto the platforms rather than onto national budgets that are already arguing about Digital Services Act headcount.

The draft does not, in the leaked summaries, name a single technical method for proving age. That fight will start the day after publication. Device-level checks, payment-card checks, digital-identity wallets and on-device estimation each fail in different ways and each raise a different privacy case at the Court of Justice. Until that method is specified, the 15-year line is a political number, not an engineering spec.

What Thursday will and will not settle

A State of the Union mention locks the Commission to the file. It does not lock the Council. Member states that already have stricter national bills will try to keep them. Member states that have nothing will try to slow the fee and the AI-companion chapter. Platforms will argue that a 15-year threshold without a workable age signal is a rule they cannot obey in a browser.

The information gain in the leak is the breadth. This is not only a social-media age of consent. It is an attempt to put games and conversational AI under the same parental-gate logic, and to make the companies pay for the referee. Whether that survives trilogue is a 2027 question. Whether von der Leyen says the number 15 on Wednesday is a 48-hour question.