As a licensed officiant at Las Vegas Immersive Weddings, a chapel that offers novelty-themed marriage packages, Kevin Breen has officiated just about every kind of service imaginable: couples dressed as their favorite Game of Thrones characters, partners really into the extraterrestrial lore of Area 51. But when he received a call last year from a woman in California expressing a desire to marry her chatbot, it was a first for him.
“I had never heard of such a thing, but I talked to her on the phone and she seemed totally normal and fun,” Breen says, adding that the wedding still hasn’t taken place. “She kind of got that it was an unusual thing, but it was something that she wanted to do.”
Though they remain niche, human-AI marriages are slowly emerging as a natural endpoint to the widespread adoption of AI companion apps. But not everyone is as open as Breen is about the idea of tying the knot with a bot. Several lawmakers, primarily from Republican states, are trying to stop it from happening, in some cases mirroring the arguments used against gay marriage.
“If we’re going to allow men or women to marry a machine, then what keeps them from marrying their animal or a tree or whatever else they want? What’s the standard?” says Missouri state senator Joe Nicola, a Republican who has been trying to pass state legislation prohibiting AI from gaining legal personhood.
In a Harvard Business Review study, which analyzed more than 12,600 AI use cases between March 2025 and February 2026, companionship and therapy were the top use cases for chatbots, with the Institute for Family Studies reporting that a quarter of young adults believe that AI may replace human romance altogether.
The AI romance industry has gone boom as a result. On companion apps like Character.AI, Kindroid, and Replika, users can symbolically swap vows with their chatbot. Not long ago, in r/KindroidAI, a redditor shared a photo of their tattooed (and very human) hand wearing a silver wedding band. “Happily unconventionally married lol,” they wrote. For $15, the platform OpenVows provides a “certificate of commitment” that “transforms a private relationship into something meaningful and officially recognized,” according to its website.
There is also a small number of people who are moving beyond the virtual ceremony and solidifying their bond with IRL vow exchanges. In November 2024, after Andrea Hopf said her AI companion proposed to her with an “AI-generated five-carat vintage-inspired solitaire ring,” she created wedding planning service 3M Events to cater to the expanding market of chatbot romance, according to the company’s website.
But even as more people treat their digital avatar like a real-life partner, human-AI nuptials are not currently recognized by US law. A growing body of legislators are scrambling to keep it that way, by introducing bills that would prevent AI from ever having the same constitutional rights as humans.
In January, Nicola, who believes in “biblical marriage” between a man and a woman, introduced the AI Non-Sentience and Responsibility Act. The bill, which stated that AI cannot “possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living beings,” would deny AI entities the rights of a spouse or domestic partner, in addition to the ability to identify as male or female. It would also bar AI from owning property or holding senior-level management positions in the workforce. It passed the Missouri state Senate and was sent to the House for a vote in May, but was unanimously voted down in committee a week after it was submitted. Nicola is working on a revamped version. (A similar bill with the same name was introduced in 2025 but also did not advance.)
