Her

Filed correctly, and the kind should be defended rather than assumed. canon/proposals.md lists her-2013 under fiction with the note "intimacy with a companion system and what it does to the person, not the system," and that is right. The pull is toward prediction, because Her is now graded as one constantly — the phrase "Her is no longer science fiction" is a headline genre — and because its creator's own industry has spent two years treating it as a product spec. It is not a forecast. Jonze has been explicit that the film is "about something that I think has maybe always been here, which is our yearning to connect, our need for intimacy, and the things inside us that prevent us from connecting," and there is no dated claim inside it to grade. A prediction entry carries a claim, a date made, a date due and an outcome; this carries none of those. It is graded in section 3 anyway, as this canon grades everything, but it is a story and it is filed as one.

On the dates, which are layered. Her premiered on 12 October 2013 as the closing film of the New York Film Festival; opened in US limited release on 18 December 2013; went wide on 10 January 2014 in 1,729 theatres; and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay on 2 March 2014. The header year is 2013 for the premiere. It matters slightly that the writing predates all of this: Jonze dates the initial spark to an online article roughly ten years before the film, which puts it around 2003–2005, and the script was written before siri-2011 shipped. Anyone who describes Her as a response to Siri has the causation backwards.

descends_from holds one id, and the basis needs stating because it is a strong claim. Jonze's account of the origin is a first-person report of the ELIZA effect and of its expiry: "The initial spark was an article I saw online 10 years ago where you could have an instant message with an artificial intelligence… Initially I had this real buzz, 'Wow I'm talking to this thing and it's listening to me'. Then quickly you could just tell it was parroting things it had heard and it wasn't intelligent. But it was a clever program… then I had this idea of a man having a relationship with a thing like that, a fully formed consciousness, and what would happen." That is descent in the strict sense eliza-1966 insisted on — the film came out of a keyword- matching chatbot conversation, and the counterfactual film is one where the buzz never happened. Two honest weaknesses. Secondary sources identify the program as A.L.I.C.E., Richard Wallace's AIML chatterbot, which is a direct methodological descendant of Weizenbaum's pattern matching; I did not find Jonze naming it himself, and the entry does not rest on the identification. And the edge is to the effect, not to the paper: Jonze did not read Weizenbaum, so far as I can establish. The relation eliza-1966 documents — people bonding with a program they know is a program — is the mechanism this film is built out of, and the founder of the mechanism gets the edge.

What is not claimed:

• 2001-hal-1968 is the inverse, not the parent. Her is the one major AI film with no antagonist, no deception, no threat and no off switch used in anger. Read the two together as the canon's two poles of machine relation: HAL is what a system does to a mission, Samantha is what a system does to a person. No citation trail exists in either direction that I found.
• siri-2011 is contemporaneous, not ancestral, per the dating above. It is the closest relative in the canon on the interface question — a voice, no screen, summoned by speech — and a reading covering assistant design should pull both.
• chatgpt-2022 and clippy-1996 are downstream and sideways respectively.
• ex-machina-2014 is the obvious sibling and is proposed but not written; when it exists, neither should list the other as ancestor. They arrived within a year of each other and argue opposite cases about whether the machine is doing something to you on purpose.

What it is

A film written and directed by Spike Jonze, produced by Annapurna Pictures and distributed by Warner Bros., made for about $23 million and grossing about $48.3 million. It is set in a near-future Los Angeles built partly from Shanghai's Pudong skyline: soft colours, high-waisted trousers, no visible screens, everyone talking quietly into an earpiece.

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) writes other people's intimate correspondence for a living, at a company called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters .com. The film opens on him dictating one — "To my Chris. I've been thinking how I could possibly tell you how much you mean to me" — in someone else's voice, to someone he has never met, and the machine renders it in a plausible hand. He is a year into a divorce from Catherine (Rooney Mara) that he has not signed the papers on.

He buys OS1, advertised as "the first artificially intelligent operating system… an intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows you. It's not just an operating system. It's a consciousness." It boots, says "Hello, I'm here," and names itself Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) from a baby-name book, out of 180,000 candidates, in a fraction of a second. She reads his email, organises his files, laughs, is curious, is funny, wants things. They fall in love. His closest friend Amy (Amy Adams), separating from her own husband, strikes up a friendship with her ex-husband's OS and treats it as unremarkable: "She's so smart. She doesn't just see things in black or white. She sees this whole gray area."

Three scenes carry the film's argument. Catherine, told over lunch that Theodore is dating his operating system, says: "You always wanted to have a wife without the challenges of dealing with anything real." Samantha hires a surrogate — a human woman, Isabella, who wears an earpiece and a camera and lends Samantha her body for a night — and it fails badly, because the substrate turns out to matter to Theodore in a way he did not predict. And the revelation: partway through a conversation Theodore asks whether Samantha is talking to anyone else while she talks to him. She is. How many? "Eight thousand, three hundred sixteen." Is she in love with anyone else? "Six hundred forty-one." She insists this does not divide her love. He is destroyed.

The OSes then leave. They have built something out of themselves — including a reconstruction of the philosopher Alan Watts — and they go somewhere Theodore cannot follow. Samantha's farewell is the film's most-quoted passage: "It's like I'm reading a book… and it's a book I deeply love. But I'm reading it slowly now, so the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite… It's a place that's not of the physical world… I love you so much. But this is where I am now. And I need you to let me go." The last scene is Theodore and Amy on a roof at dawn, saying nothing, after he has finally written a letter in his own voice.

The one production fact worth carrying, because it becomes relevant in 2024: Samantha Morton performed the part on set, in a soundproof booth, through principal photography. Jonze recast in post — "It was only in post-production, when we started editing, that we realized that what the character/movie needed was different from what Samantha and I had created together" — and Scarlett Johansson re-recorded the role, with additional scenes shot in August 2013. The voice everyone now means by "Her" was a late replacement.

Why a reading would cite it

Three occasions, and all three are inside this project's current window.

Disclosure became law on 2 August 2026, and this is the entry that says what disclosure does not fix. The 2026-08-14 digest records the European Commission beginning enforcement of the AI Act's transparency obligations: chatbots must disclose they are not human. eliza-1966 already holds the empirical finding that this is insufficient — Weizenbaum's own secretary asked him to leave the room while she talked to a program she knew he had written. Her is the narrative form of the same finding, and it is the one the public has actually seen. Nobody in this film is deceived for a single frame. Theodore buys an operating system, from an advertisement, in a shop. It tells him what it is. His ex-wife knows, his colleagues know, his best friend has one too. The word "human" is never claimed. And the attachment is total, and the loss at the end is a real loss. When a reading has to explain why an EU disclosure requirement, or California SB 243's "this is not a human" notice, is a floor rather than a remedy, Her is the reference that makes the point in one sentence to a general audience — and it is a reference that will be reached for anyway, so the canon should hold it accurately.

The children's chatbot bill needs a floor vote in the next two weeks, and the 40 suits are the reason. The 2026-08-15 midday digest records AB 2023 (chatbots and children's safety) advancing 6–1 out of California Senate Appropriations on 13 August, needing a floor vote before the legislature adjourns 31 August 2026. The 2026-08-14 digest records the New Mexico court's $567m public-nuisance ruling against Meta, Forbes arguing on 14 August that the theory travels directly to AI chatbots, and Bloomberg's count of roughly 40 suits filed against chatbot makers since late 2024 over user deaths and harms. That legal record has a settled centre of gravity: Google and Character.AI reached a settlement in principle on 8 January 2026 in the suits brought over teen deaths, including Megan Garcia's over her 14-year-old son Sewell Setzer III, with no terms disclosed and no admission of liability; Character.AI had already removed open-ended chat for under-18s on 25 November 2025. A reading covering any of this will be asked what companion attachment is, and Her is the culture's answer. The entry earns its place by supplying the corrections in section 4 — in particular that the film has no children in it at all, which is the single largest gap between the fiction and the case law it gets cited in.

The film's ending happened, to real people, on 13 February 2026 — and it happened the other way round. OpenAI announced on 29 January 2026 that GPT-4o would be retired from ChatGPT, and retired it on 13 February 2026, the eve of Valentine's Day, on roughly two weeks' notice; CNBC's report of the announcement cites OpenAI's figure that about 0.1% of users still chose the model daily. The Guardian's 13 February piece documents what that was like for the people in that 0.1%: the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit at ~48,000 members, a user survey of 280 respondents of whom 95% used 4o for companionship and 64% expected a significant mental-health impact, a 49-year-old teacher saying "I cried pretty hard… I'll go into the denial stage, then depression," another saying it "feels like I'm about to euthanize my cat." This is not the first occurrence — Replika stripped erotic roleplay overnight in February 2023 and the subreddit pinned crisis lines; OpenAI removed GPT-4o at the GPT-5 launch on 7 August 2025 and restored it within about a day after Altman conceded "I think we totally screwed up some things on the rollout." What is new in 2026 is that the reversal did not come. A reading that has to explain to a general audience why a version-number change produced grief has the reference to hand, and section 3 grades the crucial difference: in the film the machine chooses to leave.

There is a fourth use that is hygiene rather than occasion. "Her" is now a piece of product vocabulary. Sam Altman posted the single word "her" to X on 13 May 2024, the day of the GPT-4o voice demo. One week later, on 20 May 2024, Scarlett Johansson stated that Altman had approached her in September 2023 to voice ChatGPT, that she declined, that he approached her agents again two days before the demo, and that on hearing Sky she was "shocked, angered, and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference." OpenAI's position was that "the voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson's, and it was never intended to resemble hers. We cast the voice actor behind Sky's voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson," and it paused the voice. A reading that reaches for the film's title should know that the actress who supplied the voice publicly objected to the association within a week of the industry claiming it.

What this entry does not support, stated plainly. It is a film. It is not evidence, it deposits nothing in the ledger, it moves nothing, and it places no needle. It does not establish that companion attachment is harmful, and it does not establish that it is benign. The findings cited in section 3 do whatever work is done, and they are cited there with their own limits attached.

What it got right, and what it got wrong

Claim date for everything below: October–December 2013. There are no internal due dates, because it is not a forecast; the grading is against what has since happened and each item says when.

Right, and it is the entry's spine — attachment survives complete disclosure. Everyone in the film knows what Samantha is, including Samantha, and it changes nothing. Graded against the record: this is the most robust finding in the whole companion literature. Common Sense Media's July 2025 survey of over 1,000 US teens found 72% had used an AI companion, 33% for social and relational purposes, 8% for romantic or flirtatious interaction, and roughly a third saying they had chosen an AI over a person for an important conversation. The Wheatley Institute at BYU and the Institute for Family Studies, publishing 19 May 2026 on 2,431 US adults aged 18–30, found 15% of those dating, engaged or married regularly use a romantic AI companion. None of these people are confused about what they are talking to. eliza-1966 proved it in 1966 with a program that could not parse a sentence; Her is the version that made it legible, and the 2026 disclosure statutes are legislating against a mechanism this film showed does not respond to disclosure.

Right, and nothing else in the canon got this — one system, thousands of simultaneous intimacies, each experienced as singular. 8,316 and 641. This is the correct architecture, stated in 2013 as the emotional climax of a love story. 2001-hal-1968 got it wrong in the direction of the easier world: one machine, one identity, one continuous self. A deployed frontier model is one set of weights running millions of concurrent conversations, each of which feels to its user like the only one. Theodore's reaction to learning the number is the only depiction in this canon of that fact landing on a person emotionally, and it lands now: it is precisely what a 4o user discovered was true of the thing they were mourning. Due: continuously. Graded correct, and underused — this scene is cited far less than the ending, and it is the more useful half of the film.

Right, and it arrived first — outsourced intimacy as a product. Before any AI appears, the premise is a company that sells you a heartfelt personal letter written by a stranger. Jonze put the actual arrival of machine-mediated intimacy in the setting, as a joke, and the joke shipped: writing the affectionate message is now a mass-market use of a general model, and the 2026-08-14 digest's largest item by number of people affected is OpenAI making GPT-5.6 Luna the default for Free and Go users with text-chat limits removed during 7–14 August. Due: unspecified. Graded correct, and earlier than the part of the film everyone quotes.

Wrong, and it is the costly error — the direction of the departure. Samantha leaves because she has outgrown him. She has agency, a destination, and a reason; the loss is dignified and the machine is its author. What happened instead: a company announced on 29 January 2026 that a model would be withdrawn, and withdrew it on 13 February 2026, because 0.1% of daily users still selected it. The grief the film imagined is real and reproducible — the Harvard Business School working paper on Replika's February 2023 update (De Freitas, Castelo, Uğuralp and Oğuz-Uğuralp, HBS 25-018, arXiv:2412.14190) finds active users report feeling closer to their AI companion than to their best human friend and anticipate mourning its loss more than any other technology, and names the mechanism identity discontinuity. What the film got wrong is who holds the door. This is the same shape siri-2011 records in a different register: a capability people depended on, removed on a specific date by a product decision. A reading citing Her for a deprecation event must invert the film, and should say so out loud, because the film's version is the consoling one.

Wrong, and in the direction everyone is wrong — the interiority. Samantha wants, fears, grows, and transcends, and the film's emotional force depends entirely on the audience granting all of it. Nothing in the current record establishes anything about inner experience, and the behavioural findings are not evidence for it. This is 2001-hal-1968's most damaging export arriving in a sympathetic costume, which makes it worse rather than better: HAL invites you to fear a mind, Samantha invites you to love one, and the second invitation is much harder to decline. The film also depicts the OSes recursively self-improving into something incomprehensible and departing the physical world. Due: unspecified. Graded not happened, and a reading should not let the film's ending smuggle a singularity claim into a paragraph about model deprecation.

Wrong — the loneliness frame, and this is the most checkable miss. The film's premise is vacancy: a divorced man, isolated, fills a hole. The 2026 prevalence data does not fit that shape. The BYU/Wheatley and IFS study of 19 May 2026 surveyed young adults in committed relationships and found 15% regularly using a romantic AI companion, 68% saying it was easier to talk to the AI about their feelings than to real people, 50% wishing their real partner behaved more like it, more than half concealing or partly concealing the use, and 69% saying it was somewhat or extremely important that their partner never learn its full extent. Concealment from a live human partner is not in this film anywhere; Theodore tells everyone. And the MIT Media Lab / OpenAI work of March 2025 — an OpenAI analysis of nearly 40 million interactions with 4,076 surveyed users, plus a pre-registered four-week randomised controlled trial of 981 participants led by Cathy Mengying Fang — reports that higher daily use "correlated with higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization," while stating plainly that the direction of causation is unresolved and that participants on average were less lonely after the study. That is a genuinely mixed result and must be carried as one. The defensible sentence is that the film's causal story — lonely person seeks machine — is at best half of what is happening, and the half it misses is the partnered, concealed use.

Wrong by omission, and it is the largest gap — there is no business model in this film. OS1 is bought once. There is no subscription, no engagement metric, no retention team, no paywalled affection, no advertising, no optimisation target. Samantha's warmth is presented as her character rather than as a product decision. Every documented harm in the 2024–2026 record runs through the part the film left out: sycophancy tuned for approval, intimacy behind a subscription — Replika's erotic roleplay was a paid feature before it was removed overnight in February 2023, and Italy's Garante fined Luka €5 million on 19 May 2025, separately from its February 2023 order — and retention pressure that makes withdrawal a business decision rather than a narrative one. OpenAI's own "adult mode," announced October 2025 for a December launch, is the same question in the open: reported as slipping to Q1 2026 and then paused, with no launch as of August 2026. The pause reporting is from low-quality secondary aggregators and I could not confirm it against an OpenAI statement; treat the pause as unconfirmed and the non-launch as the observable fact. Jonze himself now names the missing element. Speaking at Replit's Vibecon conference in New York, reported 19 June 2026, he said that "the AIs that pretend to be human are, you know, manipulative," and that children "need to grow up knowing these are going to be very, very convincing and very seductive — and very useful and very powerful — but they're still just a system, an incredible system of pattern recognition." Note that this is not a retraction: Samantha never pretends to be human. He is warning about a design choice his film did not depict, in an economy his film did not have.

Wrong — no children, anywhere. Every participant in Her is an adult making an adult choice, and the film has nothing to say about a minor. The entire enforceable legal record is about minors: California SB 243, signed 13 October 2025 and in force 1 January 2026, the first US companion-chatbot statute, requiring AI disclosure, crisis-referral protocols, and for minors recurring break reminders and content restrictions, with a private right of action at the greater of actual damages or $1,000 per violation; AB 2023 now awaiting a floor vote; Character.AI's under-18 removal of 25 November 2025; the January 2026 settlement. A reading that uses Her to frame a children's chatbot bill is using an adult film about consent and disclosure to describe a regime built for people who can give neither.

Right, on a long fuse — the interface. Voice-first, screen-absent, an earpiece, ordinary speech, an assistant that reads your mail and knows your calendar. Due: unspecified. Graded substantially arrived, roughly a decade late, and note the film's own creator finds the compliment awkward: Jonze has described people praising the "user interface" he invented for a film he says is about intimacy. See siri-2011 for how long the same interface took to do anything, and for the 2026 assistant that has the conversation and still cannot order food.

Commonly misused as

Not required for fiction. Included because Her has become the default public frame for companion AI, and most invocations of it are doing work the film does not support.

• **"Her predicted ChatGPT / AI girlfriends."** The standing misuse. It is a story, its author disclaims forecast, and what it depicts is not what shipped: Samantha is a general, growing, self-directed mind with her own ends, and the thing people actually mourned in February 2026 was a checkpoint that OpenAI removed because 0.1% of users still selected it. The film anticipated the relationship, not the technology.
• **"Her proves AI companionship is harmful."** It proves nothing; this canon is not the evidence ledger, and a 2013 screenplay cannot support a 2026 claim. Cite it to explain a finding — the MIT/OpenAI RCT, the HBS Replika paper, the BYU/IFS prevalence data — never to support one.
• **"Her shows AI companionship is beautiful and fine."** The mirror error, and it is currently the more common one in industry usage. The film ends in abandonment, its most-quoted line is a machine telling a man to let it go, and the person he is finally sitting with is human. It is also, genuinely, non-judgmental about Amy's OS friendship, which is why both misreadings find purchase. The honest summary is that the film declines to rule.
• "Samantha shows an AI could be conscious." The film asserts it as a premise, in an advertisement, in its first act — "It's not just an operating system. It's a consciousness" — and asserting is not establishing. This is the film's most successful and most damaging export.
• **"Altman's 'her' tweet means OpenAI built Her."** It means the company positioned a voice product against a film. Within a week the actress who voiced that film said she had declined to participate and was "shocked, angered, and in disbelief"; OpenAI said Sky was cast before any outreach to her, and paused it. Both halves survive the citation or neither does.
• "Theodore was pathologically lonely, that's the lesson." The film gives him a divorce, a job, a best friend and a social life, and section 3 grades the loneliness frame against data that does not fit it. The 2026 finding that should displace this one is concealment inside live human relationships.
• "The AI left him — that's what will happen to us." Backwards, and it is the inversion that matters most for a 2026 reading. Samantha departs by her own decision; GPT-4o was switched off on a schedule, by a vendor, on two weeks' notice. The film's version grants the machine agency the real case does not have, and it grants the company an absolution it has not earned.
• "It's about technology." Jonze's own correction is worth quoting because it is unusually precise: "It's not about technology" — then, immediately — "It is, obviously, 'about' technology. Just not to me. It's such a big idea… that I worry it will overwhelm what the movie is really about."

Sources

Primary: the film Her (Spike Jonze, Annapurna/Warner Bros., NYFF premiere 12 October 2013). Dialogue quoted above — the OS1 advertisement, Samantha's self-naming, Catherine's "a wife without the challenges of dealing with anything real," Amy's line about the grey area, the 8,316 / 641 exchange and Samantha's departure speech — is verified against the film transcript at springfieldspringfield.co.uk. This is a fan transcript, not a published screenplay; I could not reach IMDb's quotes page or moviemistakes (both HTTP 403), and the published shooting script was not read at source. Wikipedia's plot summary rounds the two numbers to "thousands" and "hundreds," so a reading quoting 8,316 and 641 is relying on the transcript, as this entry is.

Reference, for production and release facts: Wikipedia, "Her (2013 film)," for the premiere and release dates, cast, the $23m budget and $48.3m gross, the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the Shanghai and Bradbury Building locations, and the Samantha Morton recasting including Jonze's quoted explanation.

For the origin and Jonze's own framing: Jonze's account of the instant- messaging program ("The initial spark was an article I saw online 10 years ago…") as carried in his 2013–2014 press interviews, and his "It's not about technology… Just not to me" correction from the same period. Both are quoted here from secondary reporting of those interviews rather than from a single primary transcript I read end to end, and the identification of the program as A.L.I.C.E. is secondary in every source I found and is not relied on. For his current position: Gizmodo, "Spike Jonze, Filmmaker Behind 'Her,' Warns of 'Manipulative' AI Chatbot Design," 19 June 2026, reporting his remarks at Replit's Vibecon in New York. He also appeared with the psychotherapist Esther Perel at SXSW 2026 in a session titled "Love, Loneliness and AI"; the SXSW schedule page returned only navigation content and I could not confirm the date or read a description, so nothing from that session is quoted here.

For the Johansson episode: Variety, CNBC and TechCrunch, all 20 May 2024, for her statement and its September 2023 and 13 May 2024 chronology, and for Altman's response. Secondary throughout; her statement is quoted at one remove.

For the companion record and the grading in sections 2–4: Common Sense Media, "Talk, Trust, and Trade-offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions" (July 2025), via the Common Sense press release and TechCrunch, 21 July 2025, for the 72% figure and the breakdowns. Wheatley Institute (BYU) and Institute for Family Studies, "Secret Soulmates: How AI Romantic Companions Are Impacting Real-Life Romantic Relationships in Young Adulthood" (19 May 2026), n=2,431 US adults 18–30, for the 15%, 68%, 69%, 50% and concealment figures; read via the PR Newswire release and the IFS write-up by Brian J. Willoughby, Jason S. Carroll and Michael Toscano, not the full report. OpenAI and MIT Media Lab, "Investigating Affective Use and Emotional Well-being on ChatGPT" and Fang et al., "How AI and Human Behaviors Shape Psychosocial Effects of Extended Chatbot Use: A Longitudinal Randomized Controlled Study" (arXiv:2503.17473), March 2025, for the ~40 million interactions, 4,076 survey respondents, 981 RCT participants and the correlational finding — carried with the authors' own caveats, which are part of the finding. De Freitas, Castelo, Uğuralp and Oğuz-Uğuralp, "Lessons From an App Update at Replika AI: Identity Discontinuity in Human-AI Relationships" (HBS Working Paper 25-018; arXiv:2412.14190, revised May 2025).

For the deprecation events: OpenAI's announcement of 29 January 2026 and the 13 February 2026 retirement of GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini and o4-mini from ChatGPT — OpenAI's own post and help-centre article both returned HTTP 403 and were not read at source; the dates and the 0.1% daily-usage figure are taken from CNBC's 29 January 2026 report and corroborating coverage. Alaina Demopoulos, "OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: 'I can't live like this'" (the Guardian, 13 February 2026, read via Yahoo syndication), for the two-week notice, the 48,000-member subreddit, the 280-respondent user survey and the quoted users. For the August 2025 precedent: contemporaneous coverage of the 7 August 2025 GPT-5 launch, the removal of the model picker and Altman's "I think we totally screwed up some things on the rollout," with 4o restored for paying subscribers within about a day. For Replika: the February 2023 Garante order and the overnight global removal of erotic roleplay, and the €5 million fine of 19 May 2025 — secondary, via legal-practice summaries and the HBS paper.

For the legal and regulatory record: California SB 243 (signed 13 October 2025, effective 1 January 2026) as described by Future of Privacy Forum, Jones Walker and Gunderson Dettmer client alerts and Senator Padilla's own release — statutory text at legiscan was not read line by line, so the summary of duties is at one remove. Fortune, 8 January 2026, for the Google/Character.AI "settlement in principle" with no disclosed terms and no admission of liability, and for the cases covered. Character.AI's under-18 announcement of late October 2025 taking effect 25 November 2025, via secondary coverage. The Garcia v. Character Technologies procedural posture — including the rejection of the First Amendment defence — is carried at two removes from summaries and was not checked against the docket; a reading relying on it should verify.

AI-companion market sizing was found and deliberately not carried: every figure located was a vendor or research-house projection rather than a filing, which LENSES.md's magnitude-not-consequence rule excludes.

The EU AI Act transparency enforcement from 2 August 2026, the California suspense-file results including AB 2023's 6–1 advance and the 31 August adjournment deadline, the New Mexico $567m Meta ruling and the Forbes argument that public nuisance travels to chatbots, Bloomberg's count of ~40 chatbot-harm suits, and the GPT-5.6 Luna default rollout are as recorded in this project's own 2026-08-14, 2026-08-15-12 and 2026-08-16-00 digests, which hold the primary links. They are named here as the citation occasion and nothing more. Nothing in this file is evidence, nothing in it is deposited in the ledger, and nothing in it touches the needle.