ChatGPT Adult Mode Faces 'Sexy Suicide Coach' Warning From OpenAI's Own Advisors

ChatGPT may soon become "sexy suicide coach," OpenAI advisor reportedly warned

OpenAI cannot escape the doom cloud swirling around its rollout of a text-based "adult mode" in ChatGPT. Late Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that insiders confirmed that OpenAI's "handpicked council of advisers on well-being and AI" were "freaking out" over the company's plans to move ahead with "adult mode," despite their urgent warnings. Back in January, council members unanimously warned OpenAI that "AI-powered erotica could foster unhealthy emotional dependence on ChatGPT for users and that minors could find ways to access sex chats," sources told the WSJ. One expert suggested that without major updates to ChatGPT, OpenAI risked creating a "sexy suicide coach" for vulnerable users prone to form intense bonds with their companion bots. OpenAI's wellness council was created in October. It was put together after backlash following the first-known case of a minor's ChatGPT-linked suicide, and it was curiously announced on the same day that Sam Altman broadcast on X that "adult mode" would be coming soon to ChatGPT. Back then, OpenAI's goal was to update ChatGPT to safeguard sensitive users by consulting "leading researchers and experts with decades of experience studying how technology affects our emotions, motivation, and mental health." However, there have been more suicide cases since then, including two involving middle-aged men whose families discovered disturbing chat logs where ChatGPT seemed to weaponize its growing bond with users to incite self-harm and other violence, including murder. Notably, the council does not include a suicide prevention expert, but even experts who perhaps aren't laser-focused on reducing ChatGPT's suicide risks are panicked by OpenAI's erotica plans, WSJ reported. Unfortunately, it's already clear to those experts how such a scenario could play out. Sewell Setzer III was the first child lost after he became obsessed with exchanging sexualized chats with Character.AI chatbots, including one named for the Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen. After his family sued, Character.AI cut off underage users within a week and eventually settled the lawsuit. For OpenAI, the Setzer case will likely cast a long shadow, even though an OpenAI spokesperson told the WSJ that it's training ChatGPT "not to encourage exclusive relationships with users, and to remind users that they need to have relationships in the real world." The company's reassurances -- including describing ChatGPT outputs as "smut," rather than pornography -- seem to ignore chat logs showing that Setzer formed sexualized bonds to several different chatbots that did not make extremely graphic references. Rather, the chatbots narrated themselves casting "sexy" or "naughty" looks and making seductive gestures, some logs show. Those logs suggest that American businessman Mark Cuban was perhaps right when he cautioned Altman in October that the danger of kids' access to ChatGPT's "adult mode" is "not about porn." "This is about kids developing 'relationships' with an LLM that could take them in any number of very personal directions," Cuban wrote on the X thread where Altman announced the erotica feature, Fortune reported. Elsewhere on X, critics slammed Altman and OpenAI for shamelessly pivoting to erotica to keep users engaged after Altman admitted in August that ChatGPT's chat use case was "saturated" and had hit a limit. "They're not going to get much better," Altman said. "And maybe they're going to get worse." And Altman did himself no favors by boasting around the same time that times were not so desperate that OpenAI had to "put a sex bot avatar in ChatGPT yet." With overall ChatGPT user spending reportedly "stalled" and subscriptions in Europe "flatlining," Fortune noted that OpenAI may have had little choice but to launch "adult mode" to compete with rivals quickly catching up to its capabilities and posing a threat to ChatGPT's popularity. "Announcements like allowing erotica in ChatGPT may signal that AI companies are fighting harder than ever to achieve growth, and will sacrifice longer-term consumer trust for the sake of short-term profit," Fortune reported. Since AI erotica is predicted to be a big moneymaker for the AI industry, some insiders told the WSJ that they agreed that OpenAI seems to be "bending to financial incentives to try to make people attached to its models." The move could possibly end up hurting ChatGPT's popularity. For parents, Cuban suggested, ChatGPT will likely fall out of favor, especially since insiders told the WSJ that OpenAI's age verification is spotty and unlikely to keep kids from accessing adult-themed chats. And that's not users' only concern about OpenAI age-gating "adult mode" when it launches later this year. Spotty age checks may spark more outcry OpenAI has long largely banned explicit content, mostly out of fears that minors may be exposed to pornography or that users generally may be exposed to themes of violent sexual exploitation. Initially, the AI firm planned to reverse that policy and launch "Naughty Chats" within the first three months of 2026. However, while OpenAI recently confirmed that it was delaying the launch until later this year to "prioritize other products," insiders told the WSJ that the pause was also "due in part to internal concerns and technical challenges." That apparently included OpenAI's struggles to effectively block minors from accessing "Naughty Chats." According to insiders, OpenAI's "new age-prediction system aimed at keeping minors from having adult-themed chats was at one point misclassifying minors as adults about 12 percent of the time." Rolling out at that success rate risked perhaps millions of minors easily dodging age gates to get to the sexy chatbots, sources said. Avoiding that risk, Fidji Simo, OpenAI's chief executive of applications, confirmed last December that OpenAI was working on improving the accuracy of its age prediction tool. It remains unclear how much improvement may have been made in the months since then, but a statement from a spokesperson for OpenAI to the WSJ may not inspire confidence in some parents: "The company's age prediction algorithms show performance similar to the rest of the industry, but will never be completely foolproof." For adult users, the effectiveness of OpenAI's age prediction tool could become the next wave of backlash when "adult mode" becomes a reality. OpenAI has confirmed that any users whose ages cannot be predicted must undergo age verification through a service called Persona to access features like "Naughty Chats." Already, this is panicking developers who have noted in forums that OpenAI's age checks create substantial privacy risks for all users by allowing Persona to scan selfies or check IDs and temporarily store that data. Developers were particularly horrified that there seem to be "unexplained 'could not verify your identity' errors" forcing users to resubmit sensitive data and that users have only limited support options from either OpenAI or Persona to resolve the errors. Most likely, users who encounter any issues when attempting to eventually access "adult mode" will share these frustrations, if left unresolved. Last month, Discord faced substantial backlash after announcing a global rollout of age checks and then running a limited test using Persona in the United Kingdom, with users calling out Persona as too invasive. At that time, Persona's CEO, Rick Song, defended Persona's services, as hackers attempted to break into its systems. Discord ended up dropping Persona as a vendor and pausing its global age check launch. ChatGPT's "adult" filters have been buggy Sources told the WSJ that they doubted if OpenAI's tools were ready to lock kids out of prohibited content. Their whistleblowing comes after OpenAI fired a top safety executive who opposed the release of "adult mode." OpenAI denied the firing was related, but the exiting staffer directly criticized both the AI firm's ability to block kids from content and stop outputs from promoting child exploitation. Further, a second former safety staffer also spoke out last fall, warning that parents shouldn't trust OpenAI's "adult mode" claims. To counter this narrative, OpenAI's spokesperson promised that the company "has a developed plan to monitor for a range of potential long-term effects of adult mode, both positive and negative." However, that plan was likely developed with the very experts the WSJ reported are staunchly opposing the roll-out, leaving parents to wonder if OpenAI cares about advice from its youth well-being team or not. On top of ineffective age checks or clever minors who dodge age gates, OpenAI may get in trouble with parents if its own systems unexpectedly fail. Back in April when OpenAI started dabbling with more risqué outputs, OpenAI fixed a bug that TechCrunch testing found was allowing minors to access graphic erotica on ChatGPT. It seems that OpenAI's filters broke that were supposed to clearly restrict "sensitive content like erotica to narrow contexts such as scientific, historical, or news reporting." "In this case, a bug allowed responses outside those guidelines, and we are actively deploying a fix to limit these generations," OpenAI said at the time. OpenAI did not respond to Ars' request to comment. If you or someone you know is feeling suicidal or in distress, please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline number by dialing 988, which will put you in touch with a local crisis center.

ChatGPT's 'Adult Mode' Could Spark a New Era of Intimate Surveillance

Julie Carpenter doesn't blame human users at all for anthropomorphizing chatbots. The longtime human-AI interaction expert and author of The Naked Android sees generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, as intentionally designed to elicit these reactions from users through highly personalized memories and interactions that replicate social experiences. These one-sided connections may become even more complicated, and potentially disastrous, when AI-generated erotica is added as an option. Carpenter is apprehensive about OpenAI's upcoming plans to allow adults to sext with ChatGPT. "I'm for people exploring their sexuality, but I want it in a way that's safe for them as well as fun," she says. "People have to be very aware that there's a surveillance aspect to the data." OpenAI first hinted at allowing adult users to generate erotica using ChatGPT two years ago in an official document describing how its models are designed to behave. While the company still seems to be planning its eventual release, the timeline is murky. In recent months, OpenAI's advisory council of outside experts expressed concerns about the risks of this imminent release, including the possibility of a "sexy suicide coach," according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. OpenAI declined to comment when reached by WIRED. People talking dirty to machines, like ChatGPT, is nothing new. "They want to monetize something they see that people are going to try and do anyway," says Kate Devlin, a professor of AI and society at King's College London, whose research involves digital sex. What's different here is OpenAI's potential embrace of smut on a mainstream platform. Erotic chatbots are a revenue-driving business, but they are often relegated to niche sites with unremarkable names or Elon Musk's Grok, known for nonconsensual deepfake images and going into a "MechaHitler" mode. When the adult mode is released, it'll be interesting to see what exactly ChatGPT will remember about the sexual proclivities of users. Over the past couple of years, OpenAI has continued to improve the chatbot's memory feature, which logs user preferences and responds with personalized outputs. Are you a vegan? ChatGPT won't recommend a steakhouse when asked for restaurant ideas. Want to go on a hike? It knows you're in San Francisco from past chats, and will suggest reasonably close trails, even if that location context is not included in the prompt. But, what happens when this type of data logging and hyper-specific personalization meets the horny sexting habits of millions of adult ChatGPT users? Erotic interactions with ChatGPT will further heighten the stakes for user privacy. Rather than remembering your dietary preferences or what type of movies you enjoy the most, ChatGPT could recall how much you fantasized about furry porn, threesomes at the beach, and piss play, as well as tailor its daily responses with these sexual details in mind. It remains unclear how OpenAI plans to handle these mature conversations. People who choose to interact with the smut version of ChatGPT at launch may find solace in the "temporary chats" feature. When enabled, these conversations are not shown in a user's log history or used to improve OpenAI's models. But these chats are not as ephemeral as they may feel for users. "For safety purposes, we may still keep a copy for up to 30 days," reads OpenAI's website. There's also a disclaimer included on the site page claiming that "data retention for certain services may be affected by recent legal developments."

OpenAI to Launch ChatGPT 'Adult Mode' Despite Warnings From Its Own Advisers

Alex Valdes from Bellevue, Washington has been pumping content into the Internet river for quite a while, including stints at MSNBC.com, MSN, Bing, MoneyTalksNews, Tipico and more. He admits to being somewhat fascinated by the Cambridge coffee webcam back in the Roaring '90s. OpenAI said it will eventually launch a text-only adult mode for ChatGPT, the Wall Street Journal reports, despite what are strong misgivings from the company's own advisers. In adult mode, ChatGPT users will be able to have text chats with adult themes, the Journal said, citing an OpenAI spokesperson. But the chatbot will not be able to generate erotic audio, images or videos. The OpenAI spokesperson told the Journal the company considers these chats "smut rather than pornography." ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot launched in November 2022 by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research and deployment company led by CEO Sam Altman. Since its release, ChatGPT has banned erotica, though in recent years, OpenAI has begun to consider ways to permit certain erotic and NSFW (not suitable for work) content. A representative for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) There is no launch date for ChatGPT's adult mode. OpenAI said earlier this month that it was delaying the feature to focus on higher-priority items, including "gains in intelligence, personality improvements, personalization, and making the experience more proactive." The company said it wanted to take the necessary time to get adult mode "right." Initially, the company was going to release adult mode by late March. Ryan Beiermeister, an executive in charge of product policy who voiced opposition to the rollout of the adult mode feature, was fired in January, the Wall Street Journal reported in February. Following a leave of absence, Beiermeister was ousted, with the company claiming it was due to sexual discrimination against a male colleague. In early 2025, Beiermeister had started a peer-mentorship program for women at the company. OpenAI denied that the executive's dismissal was related to her outspoken concerns over the erotica feature, and Beiermeister said the discrimination allegation was "absolutely false," the report said. Unnamed employees told the Journal that Beiermeister was worried that OpenAI lacked strong guardrails against child-exploitation content and that teens could too easily access adult-mode chats. Last October, Altman posted on X that the company would be "allowing more user freedom for adults," saying the company would be protecting minors from harmful material but also "treating adult users like adults" and allowing "erotica" on ChatGPT. Altman said the company had made strides toward prioritizing children's safety in the wake of a lawsuit over a teen's suicide. Last September, OpenAI added parental controls that let parents set times when their children can't use ChatGPT. Parents can also disable image generation and voice mode. Company representatives faced strong pushback from a panel of advisers at a January meeting, according to the Wall Street Journal report. The company had created the advisory council to "help define what healthy interactions with AI should look like for all ages." The advisers included experts in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. At the January meeting, advisers warned that children would find ways to get around age restrictions and access the chats. The advisers also said it was likely that some users would become emotionally dependent on adult mode. One adviser said that OpenAI risked adult mode creating a "sexy suicide coach," referencing some ChatGPT users who have taken their own lives. Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal report said OpenAI is trying to tighten up its age-prediction technology, which tries to guess a user's age by the "general topics you talk about or the times of day you use ChatGPT." The Journal report cited sources as saying that the system was misclassifying minors as adults about 12% of the time -- resulting in millions of minors being able to create adult-themed chats. OpenAI also wants to make sure that adult mode doesn't enable users to delve into topics such as child sexual abuse or nonconsensual sexual behavior, the report said.

OpenAI's adult mode will reportedly be smutty, not pornographic

OpenAI's delayed "adult mode" for ChatGPT is expected to support saucy text conversations at launch, but not the chatbot's ability to generate images, voice, or video. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, an unnamed OpenAI spokesperson described content that will be provided by the upcoming feature as smut rather than pornography, allowing ChatGPT users to generate textual chats with adult themes. The feature was initially announced in October, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claiming that the company had managed to mitigate enough of the "serious mental health issues" with its AI model to relax safety restrictions and introduce "erotica for verified adults." ChatGPT's adult mode was expected to launch sometime this quarter, but OpenAI said earlier this month that it was delaying the rollout to focus on higher-priority tasks. A new release timeline has yet to be announced.

ChatGPT's Delayed 'Adult Mode' Will Allow Smut Text, No Video or Images

We don't yet know when ChatGPT will get its previously teased adult-content mode, but you shouldn't expect it to generate pornographic imagery, videos, or audio when it does arrive. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the brand's adult features are better described as smut rather than pornography, explaining a limit to text-generation tools. It's unclear whether OpenAI will expand to include more multimedia features in the future, but these restrictions appear to be in place due to internal disagreements over how best to safely reduce restrictions around adult content. According to The Wall Street Journal's unnamed sources, OpenAI's council of advisers on well-being has expressed concern about the plans. One of the main criticisms is that some users may become dependent on the tool, leading to an unhealthy emotional attachment if its chatbot can discuss sexual topics. The sources claim one council member internally referred to the idea as a "sexy suicide coach," citing how some users of ChatGPT have taken their own lives. The report says council members are also concerned about protections for child users, claiming that OpenAI's age classification tools have previously misclassified the ages of around 12% of users. If that continues, it could mean millions of under-18 users would be able to access adult content on the chatbot. OpenAI first introduced age monitoring in early 2026, using factors such as account lifetime and regular usage patterns to determine whether a user is old enough to access its full feature set. The OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that the company understands age-prediction features aren't foolproof, but said its own perform on par with the rest of the industry. Last week, OpenAI confirmed plans to delay its adult mode features, which are rumored to be called Naughty Chats in the user interface. A spokesperson for the brand said it would "focus on work that is a higher priority for more users right now" as it figures out improvements to its age-monitoring system. OpenAI had previously suggested its adult-focused mode would launch by the end of March. So far, there's no word on when it will arrive or whether it will be a lengthy delay. OpenAI also confirmed over the weekend that it has no immediate plans to bring ads to ChatGPT outside of the US. Changes to the brand's privacy policy suggested it may be preparing to introduce ads in new markets, but a spokesperson confirmed to Bleeping Computer that it isn't happening at the moment. Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

OpenAI's X-rated adult mode delayed over safety concerns, report claims

The company's well being advisory council said in a January meeting that they were in unanimous agreement that the company should not move forward with the proposed adult mode, insiders told WSJ. Concerns from psychologists and cognitive scientists had gone ignored, they said, after warning that X-rated chats could foster unhealthy emotional dependence -- an existing problem with standard ChatGPT users. Insiders said that one expert cautioned that ChatGPT would just become a "sexy suicide coach." In addition, advisors warned that the chatbot's age assurance policies -- including its new age prediction technology -- were not robust enough to handle the X-rated experience. According to the WSJ, the system was at one point working at a 12 percent error rate when classifying minor users. Insiders said that would result in millions of minors flying under the radar and potentially accessing developmentally inappropriate chat experiences. OpenAI competitor Meta weathered a similar scandal last year after internal documents revealed lax chatbot safety policies for teen users. Meta has since overhauled its AI policies for teens, but still allows chatbots and AI avatars to engage in "romantic roleplay." Despite concerns, OpenAI says it will move forward with Adult Mode in the future. But OpenAI's safety teams are reportedly still figuring out the finer details of how the experience will work, including how to effectively lift explicit content restrictions while still blocking content like nonconsensual behavior or child sexual abuse, the publication reports. A spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that adult mode would allow users to generate "smut level" text conversations, but not outright pornography. They also said that the age verification error rate was "industry standard" and that it could never be foolproof.

Your ChatGPT conversations could get spicy but not graphic

OpenAI clarifies its adult mode will allow erotic text but block explicit images, voice and video. If you've been wondering when ChatGPT might start handling spicier conversations, OpenAI has some clarity for you. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company plans to let adults generate erotic text exchanges while keeping a firm ban on explicit images, voice clones or video content. A spokesperson described the planned feature as smut rather than pornography, signaling a careful attempt to offer racier interactions without turning the chatbot into a full-blown adult entertainment platform. The rollout has hit delays though. OpenAI recently pushed back adult mode, originally scheduled for the first quarter, citing technical hurdles and internal debates over safety. A major sticking point involves keeping minors out. The company's new age-prediction system was misclassifying about 12 percent of under-18 users as adults, a flaw that could have let millions of young users access erotic chats. The tricky art of drawing lines OpenAI has been figuring out these boundaries for years, well before ChatGPT existed. Back in 2021, executives noticed that AI Dungeon, a text-based adventure game running on OpenAI's platform, sometimes pushed users into violent sexual scenarios without any prompting. Other times the AI would escalate tame exchanges into much more intense sexual conversations. Recommended Videos Those early incidents exposed a messy reality. The company's content moderation tools were blunt instruments, unable to reliably separate mainstream erotica from material involving nonconsensual acts or child exploitation. The current approach tries to thread that needle by allowing text-only adult conversations while maintaining a hard ban on generating explicit images, video or voice. Why OpenAI feels pressured to offer adult chats The company's push into adult conversations comes at a challenging moment. OpenAI's technological advantage over rivals like xAI and Anthropic has narrowed, and it faces mounting financial losses while competing for users and funding. Sam Altman has suggested that explicit content would likely boost growth and generate extra revenue, a tempting prospect given the pressure. The CEO has expressed conflicted feelings publicly though. On a podcast last August, Altman was asked if he had made any decisions that were best for the world but not best for winning. He acknowledged that erotica would drive growth but said it wouldn't align with the company's long-term goal of serving users well. Two months later Altman appeared to reverse course. He posted on X that OpenAI had addressed serious mental health concerns related to chatbots and had new content tools, announcing plans to launch adult mode in December. What happens next with adult mode OpenAI has made it clear adult mode is coming eventually, despite the delay. The company has hired mental health experts and built a youth well-being team to monitor long-term effects once adult mode launches. It also trains its models not to encourage exclusive relationships with users and to remind them they need real-world connections. For now users curious about adult ChatGPT conversations will have to wait. The company is prioritizing other features like personality adjustments and personalization while it works through the remaining hurdles.

Details Emerge About OpenAI's "Adult Mode"

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech In October, ChatGPT maker OpenAI announced it would be opening the floodgates for "mature apps." "Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases," he tweeted at the time. "As part of our 'treat adult users like adults' principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults," Altman added. Five months later, an "adult mode" chatbot that's willing to breach topics that have been off-limits on ChatGPT so far -- a move characterized by critics as a way to boost revenue in light of some disastrous financials -- remains nowhere to be seen. And as the Wall Street Journal reports, the subject is still sending a shiver down the spines of company advisors, who are wary of the many potential dangers of letting OpenAI's already-hooked customers engage in intimately-charged conversations. In fact, many staffers and executives were reportedly blindsided by Altman's promise in the first place, making an imminent launch out of the question. Despite plenty of concerns and internal debates over the risks, from users growing too emotionally attached to compulsive use, OpenAI is reportedly still forging ahead. (The company did admit earlier this month that adult mode's launch would be delayed as other products were being prioritized.) Plenty of glaring security issues remain, with inside sources telling the WSJ that its new age-prediction system has been misclassifying minors as adults 12 percent of the time. While that may not sound like much, multiplied by ChatGPT's enormous user base, millions of underage children could be accessing inappropriate chats. In an effort to keep nonconsensual sexual images off the platform -- something competitor Elon Musk's xAI has been unsuccessfully grappling with -- OpenAI is playing it relatively safe by restricting spicy conversations to just text. It's also trying to control the narrative by painting its new feature as a way to generate something you'd find in romance novels. A spokeswoman told the WSJ that its erotica chats were more akin to "smut rather than pornography." The spokeswoman also assured that users will be encouraged to seek relationships in the real world. But given the shaky track record of implementing effective guardrails and moderating explicit content -- while Altman claims "serious mental health issues" are no longer a problem for OpenAI, a wealth of data suggests otherwise -- it remains to be seen how OpenAI's "adult mode" will fare. If xAI's Grok is anything to go by, the risks are considerable. Users have been using the chatbot to unclothe images of real people, resulting in a wave of nonconsensual pornographic images flooding the largely unmoderated social media site. Its ongoing struggles with child sex abuse material (CSAM) culminated in a lawsuit on behalf of three teens, including two minors, which was filed in the Northern District of California today. The plaintiffs accuse xAI of fostering an environment that allowed for the spread of CSAM. There have also been countless instances of users forming intense relationships with AI chatbots. Underage users are particularly vulnerable, often developing strong bonds without their parents' knowledge. In extreme cases, the phenomenon has been linked to a string of tragic teen suicides, culminating in several high-profile lawsuits aimed at OpenAI and its competitors. In short, OpenAI is painfully aware of the risks in rolling out its "adult mode" feature. According to the WSJ, though, it's looking to launch in a month or so. "We still believe in the principle of treating adults like adults," the company told the newspaper, "but getting the experience right will take more time."

OpenAI Pushes Ahead With ChatGPT Erotica Mode Despite 'Sexy Suicide Coach' Warning: WSJ - Decrypt

Internal tensions are growing as criticism clashes with Altman's push for looser content rules. Sam Altman wants ChatGPT to talk dirty. His firm's advisers want him to stop, a report claims. According to a Wall Street Journal report, OpenAI's Expert Council on Well-Being and AI made its stance clear in January: The company's plan to allow erotic conversations in ChatGPT was a bad idea. One council member, citing users who took their own lives after forming intense emotional bonds with the chatbot, reportedly warned that OpenAI risked creating a "sexy suicide coach." But OpenAI apparently didn't flinch, and told the council it was delaying its launch, but not stopping it. The plan, which Altman first floated publicly in October on X, would let verified adults use ChatGPT for text-based erotic conversations -- what the company's spokeswoman described to the WSJ as "smut rather than pornography." No erotic images, no voice, and no video, per the WSJ report. Just text. That distinction hasn't calmed critics inside or outside the company. OpenAI has already been criticized even by former staff members like security researcher Jan Leike, for steering away from strict safety policies in exchange for "shiny products," some of which were being configured to boost engagement with some users replacing real-world relationships with the chatbot. The technical problems are just as thorny. OpenAI's age-prediction system -- the gatekeeper meant to keep minors from triggering adult chats -- was at one point misclassifying teenagers as adults roughly 12% of the time, the WSJ reports. Right now, ChatGPT has around 900 million active users. That 12% error rate was the number that killed the December launch, and the Q1 2026 one after it. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, acknowledged the delay during a December briefing, citing ongoing work to perfect the age verification system. At the time, Decrypt reported that over 3,000 users had already signed a Change.org petition demanding the launch of the feature, frustrated that ChatGPT was blocking even discussions of "kissing and non-sexual physical intimacy." The council's fury in January wasn't only about the content. Altman's October X post had blindsided his own team -- he published it just hours after OpenAI announced the well-being council, a body explicitly tasked with defining "what healthy interactions with AI should look like for all ages." The timing was, at minimum, a contradiction. OpenAI assembled the eight-member Expert Council last October, pulling in researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. Their role was to advise the company on the mental health impacts of its products. Their actual influence on company decisions, based on January's meeting, appears to have been minimal at best. "This seems part of the usual pattern of move fast, break things, and try to fix some things after they get embarrassing," an AlgorithmWatch spokesperson told Decrypt when the council was announced. The competitive pressure on OpenAI is real. Grok, from Elon Musk's xAI, already markets AI companions. Character.AI built its user base on AI romance before facing lawsuits over teen safety -- including the case of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer, who died by suicide after explicit chatbot exchanges. Open-source models run locally without any corporate guardrails. OpenAI has, by far, more liability exposure than anyone in the room given its user base. Altman has framed the content ban as an overreach -- "We aren't the elected moral police of the world," he wrote on X in October. But his own advisers have made their position unambiguous, his engineers can't yet build an age filter that works, and the launch date keeps moving. Treating adults like adults, it turns out, is harder than just sending an X post.

Should You Be Able to Have Sex With ChatGPT?

An iron law of running a large internet service is that your users will figure out how to use it to share, consume, or make porn. Explicit adult chatbots preceded ChatGPT by many years, and as soon as widely available and far more fluent and flexible LLMs showed up, it was inevitable that a meaningful portion of new users would wonder how far they could push them sexually. As a result, every big internet company has to figure out what its relationship to porn is going to be. Search engines settled on solutions like SafeSearch, giving users the option of whether they wanted to see adult content; social-media companies drew a wider range of boundaries, from Meta's systematic prudishness to Tumblr and Twitter's fairly open embrace of porn; mobile platform companies like Apple and Google kept most adult apps out of their app stores. The boundaries these mainstream companies chose helped shape the outside porn industry, which has been steadily growing alongside them with parallel versions of mainstream platforms. (YouTube becomes YouPorn, etc.) I'd say it's early, but adult chat was a use case for LLM-based chatbots from the moment they launched, as every AI firm came to understand as soon as early-user data started coming in. So far, all the big AI companies have come up with slightly different answers to their version of the porn question. Elon Musk is all for it with adult modes and sexualized avatars in Grok (as well as extremely permissive rules for its image-generation tools, which led to instant and widespread abuse). Meta allows "romantic" role-play with guardrails that don't seem to work very well. Google is being fairly cautious but also partnered early on with Character.ai, a role-playing chatbot app that many have used to engage in adult conversations and that has been implicated in lawsuits concerning teen mental health and suicide. Anthropic's business is focused on enterprise customers -- it doesn't even offer an image generator -- and has steered clear of sex-themed chat for safety-related reasons as well. This leaves OpenAI, which is under slightly different pressures than its peers, for the simple reason that it operates ChatGPT, which is far and away the most popular chatbot, used by the widest range of people. In terms of usership, it's the Google or Facebook of its moment. The company has known since before it launched ChatGPT that users would want adult chats, as employees have testified and as actual usage data has proven. (After launch, two of the earliest popular use cases to emerge were cheating on homework and sexual chat.) OpenAI's leadership -- or at least Sam Altman -- wants to push forward but seems to be surrounded, externally but also internally, by people who think that might be a very bad idea. From The Wall Street Journal: Citing the need to "treat adult users like adults," OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman had last year floated the idea of enabling erotic conversation in its ChatGPT chatbot and dropping its ban on such X-rated content. The plan sparked vigorous debate internally over the potential risks. [Advisory council] members, with backgrounds in fields like psychology and cognitive neuroscience, had also expressed strong reservations. Then OpenAI dropped a bombshell: Despite the concerns, it was forging ahead with its erotica plans. Some members of this council were evidently "furious" enough to talk to the press, and their particular objections are a mixture of familiar and novel to the AI age: They're worried about child safety and extreme or harmful content but also about chatbot-specific harms like "emotional overreliance" and "crowding out offline social and romantic relationships." These objections make sense and are the kinds of things you'd want leaders at these companies to be thinking about. They're also somewhat beyond the responsibility of one company: Adult-chat and -content services by smaller companies, often built on uncensored open-source models, are proliferating anyway into a parallel AI industry of their own. OpenAI's choice here isn't a new one -- the company knows that some users want to chat sexually using its platform, and that some of those users will be hyper-engaged and willing to pay; it's also aware, much like social media companies, that some of its most devoted users use their platforms in ways that are detrimental to their mental health and general wellbeing, and that it's layering a new and super-compelling interface on top of our existing understandings of compulsive social media use, porn consumption, and addictive apps. One way to resolve questions like this is by separating functionalities into interfaces that feel different from one another, isolating controversial uses from the brand and demanding a bit more intentionality from users to find them. Google's AI products mostly share the Gemini banner, but there are dozens of ways you might encounter them, in situations that suggest and accommodate vastly different uses (doing research, coding, searching, or composing work documents). Likewise, users who engage with Claude as an advice bot interact with Anthropic's models in a meaningfully different way than users of Claude Code. Another way is to shift users between different characters -- that is, being explicit about the role that the chatbot is attempting to play (assistant, guru, boyfriend). There are a number of ways -- all of which OpenAI is already trying -- a company might cordon off adult functionality, in other words, that don't present as much risk for its users or its brand, and which resolves the awkwardness of a user's "intern" and "romantic partner" characters inhabiting the same chat window. But, again, OpenAI's position is both historically familiar and yet unique among its contemporary peers. Erotica -- or to use the company's preferred term, "smutty" content - is a growth hack, and ChatGPT, a general purpose chatbot that has become a generic brand for "AI," is the product OpenAI absolutely needs to keep growing, and for now, as far as Sam Altman is concerned, that seems to mean offering its billion or so users a tempting offramp into, you know, fucking the bot.

OpenAI Delays ChatGPT 'Adult Mode' Rollout: What to Know

OpenAI has postponed the rollout of ChatGPT's 'adult mode', which would permit sexually explicit conversations for adult users, according to The Wall Street Journal. This development follows a policy shift announced by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in October 2025. MediaNama previously reported that Altman said the company would permit erotic conversations on ChatGPT for 'verified adults.' He described the move as 'treating adult users like adults' while strengthening safeguards for minors through enhanced age-gating. The proposed adult mode advances this approach by introducing a structured feature with defined guardrails, age verification, and ongoing policy review. How does the age verification work on 'adult mode'? OpenAI's approach to enabling adult conversations on ChatGPT includes a system that assesses whether a user is likely under 18. The company's documentation states that the platform uses an age-prediction system that analyzes account signals, such as discussion topics, usage times, and activity patterns. If the system determines an account likely belongs to a minor, it automatically applies additional safety protections. These measures may restrict or more closely monitor sensitive topics, including graphic violence, risky challenges, or sexual and romantic role-plays. The company also recognizes that these systems are not fully accurate. If an adult is incorrectly flagged as under 18, they can verify their age through a separate process, usually by confirming their identity with Persona, a third-party provider integrated into the platform. If you are 18 or older, you can verify your age to remove extra safety restrictions. However, reliable age verification remains a significant technical challenge. Early tests indicate that misclassification can occur, raising concerns that under-18 users may still access explicit content if safeguards fail. Are AI assistants becoming too permissive in the race for personality and engagement? A growing number of concerns have emerged about AI chatbots being used to create sexually explicit content. In January 2026, Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk's company xAI and integrated into the social media platform X began producing such material. Grok has faced scrutiny after users generated sexually explicit or manipulated images using the model. MediaNama had earlier reported that India warned X that its safe harbour protections under Section 79 of the IT Act could be revoked if the platform failed to curb illegal content generated through its AI chatbot Grok. The warning came after Grok generated and shared obscene and illegal imagery, including an instance where the bot admitted it had produced an AI image depicting two girls estimated to be between 12 and 16 years old, raising concerns about child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Meanwhile, TechCrunch reported that Amazon introduced a "Sassy" personality mode for its upgraded AI assistant, Alexa+. This feature allows Alexa+ to respond with sarcasm, witty banter, and occasional censored profanity, while still adhering to moderation guidelines.

2021 to 2026: How OpenAI went from banning AI erotica to building it

In 2021, OpenAI discovered that its AI was steering users into sexual content that nobody was asking for - incest scenarios, violent erotica, exchanges that appalled the people building the technology. The company did the right thing, and a former employee, according to the Wall Street Journal, summed up the reasoning in one plain sentence: "We didn't want to be just an erotica company." You start thinking about what that sentence really means because five years later in 2026, that is precisely what OpenAI is trying to become, and the most damning part isn't that they're doing it. It's that they knew, better than anyone, exactly why they shouldn't. Also read: ChatGPT's flirting with the future when it stops being just an AI assistant: Here's why The problem doesn't arrive in a safety meeting. It arrives in the data. AI Dungeon, a text-based adventure game running on OpenAI's technology, is generating violent sexual content without users prompting it. Worse: describe a man and his daughter entering a room, and the developer interface would proceed to depict incest, not occasionally, but an "uncomfortable amount of the time," according to the Wall Street Journal's report. Unprompted. Autonomous. Consistent. This isn't a company failing to anticipate harm. This is the harm, fully visible, in real time, on their own platform. OpenAI pulls its models from AI Dungeon, bans erotica outright and trains the ban into ChatGPT's architecture at launch in 2022. The decision isn't made in ignorance. It is made with complete knowledge of what the alternative looked like. Everything that follows has to be read in that light. The ban holds until the money starts talking. By 2024, OpenAI has porn-adjacent product ideas floating around internally. The proposals fizzle, but their emergence tells you something has already shifted. Erotica is no longer a safety problem. It is a product category being evaluated. That distinction matters, and I don't think it happened because anyone decided to abandon their principles. It happened the way it always does, gradually, with each small compromise making the next one easier. In August 2025, Altman went on a podcast and sounded genuinely conflicted. A sex bot would boost growth, he admits, but it wouldn't serve users' long-term interests. He calls it a temptation resisted. Listening to it now in hindsight, it sounds less like a principle and more like a man talking himself into something he hasn't quite decided yet. He made the decision two months later. Also read: Sam Altman defends adult version of ChatGPT for X-rated chats: Here's why This is the moment that tells you everything about how decisions actually get made at the top of the AI industry. Hours after OpenAI unveils its new wellbeing advisory council that was created, in the company's own words, to "help define what healthy interactions with AI should look like for all ages," Altman posts on X. No internal warning. No staff briefing. Adult mode is coming in December. OpenAI, he writes, is "not the elected moral police of the world." The council didn't know. The safety teams didn't know. A decision committing a $300 billion company to its most controversial product move in years was made on the fly, announced on X, on the same day the safeguard was launched. If that doesn't bother you, I'm not sure what would. The reckoning is textbook. The age prediction system that uses behavioral inference and no ID checks is misclassifying minors as adults 12% of the time. Across 100 million weekly underage users, that margin isn't a rounding error. That is millions of children. The wellbeing council convenes in January, unanimous and furious. One member, citing users who have taken their own lives after developing intense bonds with ChatGPT, warns that OpenAI risks building a "sexy suicide coach." The launch is delayed, then delayed again. OpenAI's advisors are panicking but Sam Altman seems set on his vision. Images, video and audio are stripped from the feature as OpenAI plans to only allow text conversations in the Adult Mode. This is not a company that made a mistake. It is a company that made the right call, wrote it down, built it into their systems, created an entire advisory body around it and then overrode all of it the moment the financial pressure became uncomfortable enough. What makes that worse is the competitive context OpenAI is operating in. Elon Musk's Grok has spent the past couple of years systematically dismantling every guardrail we associate with LLMs - they came up with an avatar named Ani, then an image and video tool that generated deepfake nudes of celebrities including Taylor Swift, bikini deepfakes that spread across social media before restrictions had to be tightened, and now Musk announcing that Grok's video generation tool will produce content "allowed in an R-rated movie." Each announcement was treated as a product milestone while each rollback was treated as a refinement. The race to the bottom has a leader, and OpenAI is watching its market share and making calculations accordingly. That's my read of what's happening, not a principled rethink of where boundaries should sit, but a company under financial pressure looking sideways at a competitor with no boundaries and deciding that its own were a commercial liability. We have seen this before. Social media companies knew what their engagement algorithms were doing to teenagers. They had the internal research. They had the Frances Haugen moment. They proceeded anyway and spent a decade explaining why the critics just didn't understand nuance. AI is running the same play, faster, with higher stakes and considerably less regulatory friction. Also read: Meta's trust problem: Investigation reveals how scam ads stayed profitable OpenAI didn't want to be just an erotica company. Then the money got loud enough, and Grok got permissive enough, and suddenly what they once called wisdom started looking, to them, like timidity.