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Washington's general disclosure is unconditional — unlike California SB 243 and Oregon ch. 85, it does not turn on whether a reasonable person would be misled, so every covered chatbot discloses at the start of the interaction and every three hours regardless of how obviously artificial it is. Sec. 3(3) adds a model-behaviour duty rather than a copy duty: the system must be constrained from claiming to be human when asked, which is an alignment requirement in statute. The educational-tools carve-out in Sec. 2(1)(b)(iv) has no California or Oregon analogue.

The "directed to minors" trigger means an operator cannot avoid this section by declining to determine user age — audience design alone brings the product in. The eight enumerated manipulative techniques in Sec. 4(1)(c) are the most detailed engagement-design ban of the three 2026 companion statutes, reaching in-app monetisation framed as relationship maintenance (Sec. 4(1)(c)(viii)) and outputs promoting isolation from family (Sec. 4(1)(c)(v)). Minors get a one-hour reminder cadence against the three-hour general rule.

Structured as a gate on deployment: no protocol, no chatbot. Washington is the only one of the three 2026 companion statutes to name eating disorders explicitly within the detection duty (Sec. 5(2)(a)), which pulls disordered-eating content into a self-harm safety pipeline that most moderation stacks treat separately. Unlike Oregon, no specific hotline is mandated — "a suicide hotline or crisis text line" is sufficient.

No regulator receives this. Like Oregon, Washington makes the crisis-referral count a public self-disclosure rather than a filing — but it must appear both on the operator's websites and inside every mobile or web application through which the companion is offered, which is a stricter placement duty than either California or Oregon imposes. Sec. 5(3) sets no annual deadline, so the disclosure is a standing obligation that must carry the preceding calendar year's count.