Ohio’s AI marriage bill is aimed at legal status, not at stopping someone from holding a private ceremony with a chatbot. House Bill 469, introduced in late September 2025 by Republican Rep. Thaddeus Claggett, would declare artificial-intelligence systems nonsentient entities and make any claimed marriage or comparable union involving an AI legally void. As of NBC4’s October 30 update, the measure awaited its first hearing.
That distinction is doing most of the work. The available reporting says no U.S. state recognizes a marriage between a person and an AI system. Companion-app users can exchange symbolic vows or call a chatbot a spouse, but those gestures do not create the property, inheritance, decision-making or other rights that come with a legally recognized marriage.
What would Ohio’s AI marriage bill actually change?
HB 469 says an AI system could not be recognized as a spouse or domestic partner, or receive a legal status analogous to a marriage or union with a human or another AI. The proposal would also prevent an AI from acquiring legal personhood, according to NBC4.
The bill goes well beyond the aisle. It would bar AI systems from owning or controlling real estate, intellectual property and financial accounts, and from serving as a company manager, director or officer. For harm caused by an AI system, the proposal would place responsibility on its human owners or developers.
Claggett, who chairs the Ohio House Technology and Innovation Committee, told NBC4 that he wants to prevent software from exercising human-like legal agency. He pointed to powers that spouses may hold, including power of attorney and financial or medical decision-making. His stated concern was the legal consequences of personhood, rather than whether people stage ceremonies with software.
Chatbot romance is real as a user behavior, though the scale is difficult to establish from the evidence available. Services such as Character.AI, Kindroid and Replika allow users to conduct symbolic vow exchanges, Wired reported. OpenVows sells a $15 commitment certificate, but its description of that document as “officially recognized” is a company marketing claim, not legal recognition. NBC4 also cited a survey by marketing company Fractl in which 3% of 1,000 AI users said they considered a chatbot a romantic partner. That is a commercial survey, not a population estimate.
What happened to Missouri’s proposal?
Missouri state Sen. Joe Nicola, a Republican, pursued a similar AI Non-Sentience and Responsibility Act. The measure would have barred AI personhood, human-AI marriage, property ownership and corporate-officer roles while assigning liability for AI-caused harm to a person or organization, with courts deciding responsibility in individual cases.
Its path was messy, as legislative paths tend to be. The Missouri Independent reported in April 2026 that the effort had stalled in the Senate amid worries about federal rural-broadband funding. Wired later reported that the bill passed the Senate in May, then was unanimously rejected by a House committee about a week after arriving there. Nicola was working on a revised version, Wired reported.
Neither proposal reflects a court ruling or a new doctrine of marriage law. They are state bills intended to lock in a boundary that the supplied reporting says already exists: chatbots may be treated as partners by users, but they are not legal spouses.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
