California is drawing a line around how far AI can go in pretending to be a therapist. California lawmakers are confronting a harder question: which decisions still require a licensed human professional when chatbots can increasingly sound like one? But the proposal clarifies that it is not a general ban on AI in mental healthcare. But for California lawmakers, the cases add context to a broader problem. If lawmakers decide that some roles require enforceable boundaries between AI assistance and human professional judgment, healthcare may be only the beginning.