Texas Age Verification Law: Chapter 129B and FSC v. Paxton Explained

Texas requires commercial websites where more than one-third of the content is sexual material harmful to minors to verify that a visitor is 18 or older before granting access. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that requirement 6-3 in June 2025, and that decision, Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, is now the controlling precedent for the whole category of state age-verification statutes this site covers. Chapter 129B is the statute the Court reviewed, not the precedent itself.

This article covers Texas's adult-content age-verification law (Chapter 129B, enacted by House Bill 1181) and, separately, Texas's newer App Store Accountability Act (Senate Bill 2420), which regulates Apple's and Google's app stores rather than individual websites. The two statutes are unrelated except that both originated in the Texas Legislature, and this page keeps them in separate sections so their very different court histories are not confused with each other.

What Texas's Age-Verification Law Requires

Chapter 129B applies to a commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material on a website, including a social media platform, where more than one-third of the total content is sexual material harmful to minors. A covered site must use a reasonable age-verification method under Section 129B.003 before letting a visitor access that material: either digital identification or a commercial age-verification system that checks a government-issued ID or relies on a commercially reasonable method using public or private transactional data.

Section 129B.002(b) bars a commercial entity, or a third party, that performs the age verification required by Subsection (a) or (a-1) from retaining any identifying information of the individual. Chapter 129B took effect September 1, 2023.

The 2025 Amendment: AI Tools That Generate Sexual Material

House Bill 581, effective September 1, 2025, extended Chapter 129B past ordinary adult websites to the artificial-intelligence tools that generate sexual imagery. It added Section 129B.002(a-1), which requires a commercial entity that operates a website with a publicly accessible tool for creating artificial sexual material harmful to minors, or that otherwise makes such an application publicly available, to use the same reasonable age-verification methods under Section 129B.003 to confirm that the individual reaching the tool is 18 or older. That duty attaches to the generator itself, so the one-third-of-content threshold described above does not gate it.

Section 129B.002(a-2) creates a safe harbor from that duty. An entity is exempt if it does both of two things: prohibits the generation of artificial sexual material harmful to minors in terms and conditions a user must acknowledge before being granted access, and takes affirmative steps to limit that generation through technological tools. The statute illustrates those steps as training an application to identify likely sexual material, providing effective reporting tools, filtering likely sexual material, filtering AI-generated sexually explicit content before it is shown to users, and filtering sexually explicit images out of the training dataset.

The same act added Section 129B.0045, which requires an entity operating such a tool to ensure that any individual used as a source for the material is 18 years of age or older and has consented to the use of that individual's face and body as a source. Entities covered by the (a-2) safe harbor are excluded from Section 129B.0045 as well. The chapter defines artificial sexual material harmful to minors as computer-generated sexual material harmful to minors that was produced, adapted, or modified using an artificial intelligence application or other software in which a person is recognizable as an actual person by the person's face, likeness, or other distinguishing characteristic.

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton: the Supreme Court Case That Settled the Question

Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, 606 U.S. 461 (2025), decides whether Chapter 129B, and by extension the similar laws in roughly two dozen other states, survives the First Amendment. The Supreme Court affirmed the Fifth Circuit's judgment 6-3 on June 27, 2025, in an opinion by Justice Thomas joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

The Court held that Chapter 129B's age-verification requirement triggers, and survives, intermediate scrutiny, not strict scrutiny, because the law only incidentally burdens adults' protected speech: it does not ban access to the material, it conditions access on proof of age. As the Court put it, no person, adult or child, has a First Amendment right to access speech that is obscene to minors without first submitting proof of age. Justice Kagan's dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, argued strict scrutiny should apply because the law is content-based, though Kagan separately wrote the law would likely pass strict scrutiny anyway. That decision, not the Texas statute, is the precedent every other state's age-verification law is now measured against.

The Health-Warning Label Is Enjoined; the Verification Requirement Is Not

Chapter 129B originally also required covered sites to display a health-warning label about the effects of pornography. In its March 7, 2024 decision in this same case, the Fifth Circuit split the two requirements apart. It vacated the district court's injunction against the age-verification requirement, holding that rational-basis review applied and that the requirement is rationally related to the state's legitimate interest in preventing minors' access to pornography. It affirmed the injunction as to the health warnings, agreeing that Section 129B.004, which required three Texas Health and Human Services warning notices on a covered site's landing page, unconstitutionally compelled the plaintiffs' speech under National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra. The Supreme Court's 2025 decision affirmed that judgment on the age-verification provision, though it applied intermediate scrutiny rather than the Fifth Circuit's rational-basis standard, and it did not disturb the warning-label injunction.

The practical effect for a Texas visitor is straightforward either way: a covered site must verify a visitor's age, but it does not have to display the health-warning label.

What Happens When You Visit an Affected Site From Texas

Texas's law does not ban adult content and does not prohibit an adult from viewing it once age is verified; it requires the site to check first. Some platforms chose to comply. Others did not. Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, geo-blocks visitors from Texas entirely rather than build a verification system, and has said publicly that its objection is to how age verification is implemented, particularly privacy concerns with ID-based systems, not to age verification as a concept.

That distinction matters for how the law gets described. A headline reading «Texas bans porn» overstates what Chapter 129B actually does: the statute requires verification, and a site's decision to block Texas traffic rather than comply is that company's own business choice, not a government prohibition on the content itself.

Penalties for Noncompliance

Chapter 129B is enforced only by the Texas Attorney General under Section 129B.006. There is no private right of action under this chapter, a structural difference from states such as Louisiana and Arizona that let private parties sue directly. The Attorney General can sue in Travis County or the violating entity's home county for injunctive relief and civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each day the entity operates a website or makes an application available in violation of the chapter's age-verification requirements, up to $10,000 for each instance of improperly retained identifying data, and an additional civil penalty of up to $250,000 if a minor actually accessed the material as a result of noncompliance. Since September 1, 2025, Section 129B.006(b) has reached violations of Section 129B.0045 as well as Sections 129B.002 and 129B.003, so the same penalty scale applies to an AI tool that fails the source age and consent requirements.

Texas Also Regulates App Stores: the App Store Accountability Act

Separately from Chapter 129B, Texas's App Store Accountability Act (Senate Bill 2420, codified at Business and Commerce Code Chapter 121) requires Apple's and Google's app stores, not individual websites, to verify a user's age and obtain parental consent before a minor downloads certain apps or makes in-app purchases. The core duty sits in Section 121.021, titled Duty to Verify Age of User; Age Categories, which requires an app store owner to use a commercially reasonable method of verification to place each Texas account holder in one of four age categories: child for anyone under 13, younger teenager for 13 through 15, older teenager for 16 or 17, and adult for 18 and over. Section 121.022 then requires parental consent before a minor downloads an app or makes a purchase. Chapter 121 took effect January 1, 2026. It is a newer, still-litigated statute regulating a different layer of the internet and should not be confused with the adult-content law described above.

A federal district judge preliminarily enjoined enforcement of SB 2420 in December 2025. The Fifth Circuit stayed that injunction on May 28, 2026, finding Texas had made a strong showing of likely success on the merits, and the law has been enforceable since June 4, 2026, per Apple's own developer notice. Two industry groups then asked the Supreme Court to vacate the Fifth Circuit's stay on an emergency basis; on July 6, 2026, the Court denied both applications in a brief, unsigned order with no noted dissents. That is a shadow-docket denial of emergency relief, not a ruling on SB 2420's constitutionality, and the underlying Fifth Circuit appeal remains open. Do not describe the July 2026 order as the Supreme Court upholding or ruling the app-store law constitutional. The Fifth Circuit heard oral argument on the merits appeal itself on August 4, 2026, before Circuit Judges Cory T. Wilson, Carl E. Stewart, and James E. Graves; the panel took the case under advisement with no ruling issued as of this writing.

The statutory text described here was checked against the enrolled texts of House Bill 1181 (2023), House Bill 581 (2025), and Senate Bill 2420, and against the Fifth Circuit's March 7, 2024 opinion in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, current as of 2026-09-02. The litigation dates in the App Store Accountability Act section come from case reporting rather than from the court's own docket, and the Fifth Circuit's SB 2420 appeal is ongoing, so confirm the current posture before relying on that section for a time-sensitive decision.

Related Resources

• Age Verification Laws by State
• App Store Age Verification Laws
• KOSA and COPPA 2.0: Federal Age-Verification Legislation
• Mississippi Age Verification Law
• Utah Age Verification Law
• Texas Data Privacy Laws

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Last updated: 2026-09-02.