PUBLICATION AND CREATION OF MATERIAL HARMFUL TO MINORS.

(a) A commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material on an Internet website, including a social media platform, more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors, shall use reasonable age verification methods as described by Section 129B.003 to verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older.

(a-1) Except as provided by Subsection (a-2), a commercial entity that operates an Internet website with a publicly accessible tool for creating artificial sexual material harmful to minors or otherwise makes publicly available an application for creating sexual material harmful to minors shall use reasonable age verification methods as described by Section 129B.003 to verify an individual attempting to access the tool is 18 years of age or older.

(a-2) Subsection (a-1) does not apply to a commercial entity that:

(1) includes a prohibition against the generation of artificial sexual material harmful to minors in the entity's terms and conditions or use policies that must be acknowledged before a user is granted access; and

(2) takes affirmative steps to limit the creation of artificial sexual material harmful to minors through technological tools such as training an application or software creating artificial images to identify likely sexual material, providing effective reporting tools, filtering likely sexual material, filtering sexually explicit content generated by artificial intelligence before the material is shown to users, or filtering sexually explicit images from the entity's artificial intelligence dataset before the dataset is used to train the artificial intelligence.

(b) A commercial entity that performs the age verification required by Subsection (a) or (a-1) or a third party that performs the age verification required by Subsection (a) or (a-1) may not retain any identifying information of the individual.