California law would force all operating systems to have age verification

Assembly Bill No. 1043 was signed into law by Gavin Newsom in October of last year and is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027. The measure outlines several obligations, stating that "An operating system provider shall do all of the following: (1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store. (2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user."

The law divides users into four age brackets: children younger than 13, teens 13 to under 16, minors 16 to under 18, and adults described as "at least 18 years of age."

In practical terms, the statute stops short of mandating verification methods such as facial recognition, but it obligates operating system makers to gather some form of age information when accounts are created and to share an age-category signal with third-party developers who request it.

For companies like Microsoft, this may not represent a dramatic shift, as its account registration already asks for a birth date. But the broader requirement that all operating system vendors comply within California may stir frustration with the other companies.