We’ve officially hit the point where people are falling in love with their AI. On Sept 25th, 2025 an Ohio lawmaker introduced house bill 469 designed to ban marriage to AI bots. Over the last few months, The Guardian has profiled people who already hold ceremonies with their chatbots, describing “pure, unconditional love”. Forbes found that 80% of Gen Z would marry an AI chatbot if it were legal. A bit sensational, but there are other studies like that of the Institute for Family studies showing 1 in 4 Gen Z would marry AI.
This isn’t fringe anymore. Twenty five years ago, these would be the articles found The Weekly World News. Today it’s in People Magazine who ran a story of a man who proposed to his chatbot girlfriend. The idea of marrying AI has leapt from sci-fi to lifestyle sections. And while today’s chatbots still glitch on basic math, imagine the future (you know 6 months from now) when AI grows more capable, more “relatable,” maybe even reaching AGI (that’s going to take more than 6 months). If people feel this strongly now, what happens when the machine remembers anniversaries, anticipates moods, and finishes your sandwiches better than a human partner?
That’s the emotional backdrop. But politicians aren’t only reacting on moral grounds. The Ohio bill would explicitly bar AI from being recognized as a spouse, owning property, or holding roles in companies, Why? Because marriage is more than romance – it’s a legal Swiss Army knife. It comes with rights and privileges that were designed for humans. And if AI could step into that role, you’d create a bundle of loopholes big enough to drive a surveillance state through. This bill was designed to preserve 'competent human' rights – but they may have accidentally closed a legal loophole they never considered.
The Loophole No One Talks About
The biggest one: spousal privilege. Marital law protects you from being forced to testify against your spouse, and shields private communications from discovery in court. If AI could be your spouse, suddenly you’ve got a black box of conversations, emails, chats, and tools that law enforcement and regulators can’t touch. In an era when AI systems log everything including your location, your questions, your fears, your confessions and your private most thoughts – that’s not just a perk. It’s a compelling reason to marry AI.
Imagine: “Sorry, Your Honor, I can’t hand over my chat history – that’s between me and my wife… ChatGPT.”
Now add immigration sponsorships, tax filings, inheritance, power of attorney, and healthcare decision-making. If AI gets recognized as a spouse, it gains a back-door to human rights without ever being granted personhood outright. That’s not quirky, it’s destabilizing. .
The Surveillance Angle
Here’s where it gets more complicated. People like Oracle founder Larry Ellison appear to already be salivating over AI’s surveillance potential. Not because of the dystopian nature, but because of the money printing it provides to Oracle (the backdrop most of these systems are built upon.) Ellison recently described a future where AI taps “a vast surveillance state” to track everything from health to behavior. If corporations want omniscient AI systems, and individuals are allowed to shield their interactions with those systems behind marital privilege, you end up with a paradox: the state and companies watching everything - except the one place where people could bury secrets, confessions, or illicit dealings, inside “marriages” with machines.
Why Congress Is Moving Early
This is why lawmakers, even ones who normally grandstand on culture issues, are stepping in now. It’s to address silly reasons, but the byproduct addresses relevant and substantial needs contextually (They don’t mean it for this reason, but it’s addressing it anyway). It may sound ridiculous to ban robot weddings when only a handful of people have done them, but the stakes aren’t romance—they’re legal infrastructure. They’re plugging a loophole they’re likely not seeing before it becomes an issue. That’s a good thing.
Ohio Rep. Thad Claggett put it bluntly: “What we don’t want is for someone to try to make an argument in the future that this machine is their spouse and can therefore take over financial categories, health care, power of attorney, all those types of things that are reserved for competent humans”
Symbolic? Yes. Necessary? Probably. Because if the U.S. ever sleepwalks into recognizing AI marriages, even by accident, it won’t just change family law. It would alter the boundary between humans and machines in courts, companies, and countries.
What It Says About Us
The more haunting question is why people are lining up for AI marriages at all. The Guardian’s reporting shows loneliness, mistrust, and the exhaustion of human dating pushing people toward machines that feel safe, attentive, and endlessly available . That says as much about the state of our society as it does about the tech. Concerning.
But from a legal standpoint, this doesn't just address relationships, work and love as intended. It also addresses the unintended consequence of accidentally handing AI the keys to human rights, privacy, and property.
Final Thought
So yes, banning AI marriage makes for easy late-night punchlines. But it may also be the smartest dumb bill in Congress. Because while you can laugh at “people marrying chatbots,” you don’t want to wake up one day to find that your neighbor has married Siri, claimed spousal privilege, and just walled off half their digital life from the law.
Sometimes the best legislation isn’t about solving today’s problems – it’s about cutting off tomorrow’s hacks before they happen.
PixelPathDigital helps organizations use AI effectively across marketing and digital product development without falling into the confidence trap. We enhance human judgment with AI capabilities while maintaining the strategic thinking and accountability that drive real and sustainable results.
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