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Structured as a gate on operation, not a best-efforts duty: it is unlawful to operate or provide the companion at all unless the protocol is built in. Rhode Island's definition is narrower than California SB 243's reasonable-person test — the three limbs in § 6-63-1(1)(i) are conjunctive, so a system that never asks unprompted emotion-based questions falls outside the chapter. But the protocol scope is broader on one axis: it reaches threatened physical harm to others (§ 6-63-2(a)(2)), which California does not cover.

Unconditional and age-blind, unlike California SB 243, where the opening disclosure turns on a reasonable-person test and the three-hour repeat applies only to known minors. Rhode Island requires both the opening notice and the three-hour repeat for every user, which makes it a session-flow design constraint rather than a copy change. The notice may be verbal or written, so voice-first products are covered without a screen.

The statute fixes the reporting floor — activation counts — and leaves "related metrics" undefined, so the reportable set is whatever the Attorney General's office asks for; there is no rulemaking grant in the chapter to constrain that. Because the AG must publish aggregated data, the counts become a public dataset comparable across operators, which is the same disclosure dynamic as California's Office of Suicide Prevention reports.