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Maine put this rule in Title 10 (commerce and trade), not in a licensing chapter, which is what gives it reach beyond Maine licensees: § 1500-EE(2) binds any "person" who offers therapy to the Maine public through Internet-based AI, and § 1500-EE(3) converts a violation into an Unfair Trade Practices Act violation enforced by the Attorney General. The statute never calls itself an AI law in its operative duty — it is drafted as a licensure and trade-practices rule — yet the therapeutic-communication definition at § 1500-EE(1)(C)(3), "offering emotional support, reassurance or empathy in response to psychological or emotional distress", describes ordinary consumer companion-chatbot behavior, not only purpose-built therapy products. Advertising and offering are covered alongside providing, so marketing an AI mental-health product into Maine is itself the violation. The IRB carve-out mirrors Rhode Island's and Vermont's, which is now the settled shape of this exemption across the three states.

The allocation of liability is unqualified: § 2113(2)(A) makes the licensee responsible for "all interactions, outputs and data use" associated with the AI, with no carve-out for vendor-controlled design or algorithms — the opposite of Rhode Island's § 40.1-5.5-3(c)(2), which expressly excludes vendor-controlled system design from provider responsibility. A Maine licensee therefore cannot contract that residue away, which is what pushes the duty onto vendor selection and configuration. The prohibitions at § 2113(4) fix the human-in-the-loop boundary — no independent therapeutic decisions, no direct therapeutic interaction with clients, and no recommendation or treatment plan that has not been reviewed and approved by the licensee. P.L. 2026 ch. 687 replicates § 2113 verbatim across six further licensing chapters (32 M.R.S. §§ 2600-G, 3300-J, 3820-A, 6207-D, 7009, and 13870), so the same duty attaches to every board that licenses a mental-health profession in Maine; the rules implementing it are major substantive rules under 5 M.R.S. ch. 375, subch. 2-A, meaning they must go back to the Legislature for review before final adoption.

This is the requirement neither Vermont nor Rhode Island has: Maine permits AI supplementary support "only when the client's therapeutic session is recorded or transcribed" (§ 2113(3)). That is an affirmative surveillance precondition, not a restriction on surveillance — a practice that wants an AI scribe or progress-tracking tool must first put the session on the record. Paired with it is a consent definition (§ 2113(1)(C)) that is unusually strict even against Rhode Island's: consent must be a clear, explicit, affirmative act communicating express, informed, voluntary, specific, unambiguous written agreement, revocable by the client, and it expressly is not acceptance of a general or broad terms-of-use agreement, not hovering over, muting, pausing, or closing electronic content, and not anything obtained through deceptive actions. The disclosure at § 2113(3)(A)(3) reaches further than either sibling statute: the client must be told in writing how session data will be stored, retained, **used for training**, and deleted on termination of services — a written commitment about training-data use, made per client. And § 2113(5) bars the licensee from denying or refusing treatment because the client withheld consent, so declining AI is genuinely costless for the client and fully blocking for the licensee. Any client waiver of the section is void as contrary to public policy (§ 2113(11)), which forecloses the intake-paperwork workaround.