OpenAI Debuts ChatGPT for Teens With Study Mode and Parental Controls After Safety Lawsuits

OpenAI launches a safer ChatGPT for teens -- years after teens started using it

After numerous lawsuits over AI chatbots' lack of safety measures, leading to teens' suicides and other mental health concerns, OpenAI on Monday announced the launch of ChatGPT for Teens. The new product promises to include additional safety measures, as well as the educational crisis of ChatGPT-assisted cheating in schools. On the educational side, ChatGPT for Teens introduces a new Study Mode feature and other tools designed to encourage teen users to engage their curiosity and work through problems, not just get quick answers. As OpenAI explains in a blog post, the Study Mode option will give teens guiding questions and step-by-step support to help them understand the material. Meanwhile, the teen experience will also include homework reminders that appear when a teen appears to be trying to cheat, instead of understanding the material. The AI chatbot will then push the teen to use Study Mode instead. The app will also support quizzes and learning visualizations, and controls that allow parents or guardians to decide when Study Mode is enabled by default, the company says. Still, it's not clear how difficult it will be for teens to escape these new systems if they decide not to cooperate. Teens are incredibly adept at working around parental controls and other attempts to lock down digital experiences. Until ChatGPT's teen mode can be put to more strenuous tests, it's unclear how difficult it will be to work around these safety measures in reality. OpenAI says app-appropriate protections will be on by default in ChatGPT for Teens, which are designed to reduce exposure to harmful or developmentally inappropriate content. These measures are based on OpenAI's Under-18 Principles in our Model Spec, which the company claims to be informed by "developmental science and guidance from experts." Parents will also be able to use the family tools and parental controls previously introduced to manage settings, receive safety notifications, and set Quiet Hours, among other things. OpenAI announced a partnership with CodeAI to help teens learn more about AI, including how it works, how to direct it or question it, and how to use it. In the classroom, OpenAI already offers ChatGPT for Teachers to help provide schools with institution-managed access to AI and support.

ChatGPT Launches a Version of Its Model for Teens - CNET

OpenAI announced Tuesday that it's launching a version of ChatGPT intended for teenagers, amid concerns about how younger people interact with generative AI tools. Users between the ages of 13 and 17 will automatically use the teen-specific version, which will feature parental controls, stronger safeguards and notifications prompting them to take breaks. Many AI companies, including Google, allow people aged 13 or older to use their chatbots, while Anthropic requires users to be 18 or older. OpenAI says it created ChatGPT for Teens with four guidelines in mind: "put teen safety first, encourage real-world support, treat teens like teens and be transparent about how our systems should behave." Makers of AI chatbots have faced widespread questions and criticism over a lack of guardrails in their products, which many people use every day. The protections now being folded into chatbots are similar to those built into Instagram teen accounts. The teen experience in ChatGPT OpenAI says its model for teens is intended to "expand educational opportunity" and to provide support outside the classroom. ChatGPT for Teens includes a new Study Mode that provides step-by-step guidance on concepts and homework materials, while also detecting when students attempt to use the model as a shortcut for cheating. With the Study Hours feature, teenage students and parents can set parameters to have Study Mode turn on by default. ChatGPT for Teens will also feature quizzes and visualizations intended to support learning. "Not every student has someone at home who can help when they get stuck or have questions with their homework. With the right guardrails, AI can help fill that gap," Racquel Gibson, a Miami high-school math teacher, said in OpenAI's blog post about ChatGPT for Teens. ChatGPT for Teens includes built-in protections against overuse and is designed to help prevent emotional dependency, including the chatbot becoming a substitute for real-world companionship and relationships. A survey released last year by Common Sense Media found that 72% of teens regularly use chatbots for companionship and advice. In its press release, OpenAI states this teen experience is designed to "support real-world relationships and healthy habits, with break reminders that encourage teens to step away, and product cues that consistently identify ChatGPT as AI." The model will reportedly block attempts at romantic or sexual roleplay and will not respond to prompts in a way that will imply it has feelings or consciousness. Other teen safeguards will include reminders cautioning teens not to share sensitive information or images, as well as onboarding instructions on how best to use the chatbot safely. OpenAI has repeatedly come under fire for ChatGPT's sycophancy and its lack of age-specific safety measures to prevent young people from becoming dependent, resulting in a slew of legal actions. One lawsuit involved a family who alleged that their 16-year-old son took his own life after the chatbot encouraged his suicidal ideation. The publicity led OpenAI to pledge to add safeguards to its models and to introduce parental controls in September 2025.

ChatGPT is getting a dedicated mode for teens

OpenAI is introducing a dedicated ChatGPT mode for teenagers, combining existing youth safeguards and new safety features under one roof. The launch comes amid mounting public scrutiny over how AI tools affect younger users, as other platforms implement their own age checks and teen-specific protections. ChatGPT for Teens is "an experience designed to help teens learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence," OpenAI said in a blog post published Tuesday. Teen mode will automatically apply to users who identify themselves as being between the ages of 13 and 17, as well as those the system estimates to be under 18. Children under 13 aren't permitted to use the platform, according to OpenAI's published age policy. The teen experience will apply protections by default, including tighter restrictions on prohibited or sensitive content including graphic violence, depictions of self-harm, and sexual or romantic roleplay. It will also surface warnings and safety information around topics such as eating disorders, while giving parents controls to set quiet hours and receive notifications about safety alerts if the system flags a possible safety risk. Other features are aimed at encouraging what OpenAI describes as "healthy, balanced use," including reminders around sensitive image uploads, teen-specific onboarding, and customization options such as accent colors and voice variations. OpenAI is also adding new "responsible homework reminders," which it says can recognize when a teen appears to be "trying to shortcut an assignment" and redirect them to ChatGPT's dedicated study mode. Teens or parents can also set "study hours" that automatically enable study mode during designated times. Though OpenAI is framing this as a new teen-focused ChatGPT experience, many of the protections it describes aren't new, with the launch largely consolidating existing safeguards alongside a handful of smaller additions and tweaks. OpenAI rolled out age-prediction features at the start of the year, while parental controls and study mode arrived roughly a year ago. The company said it would show teens more frequent break reminders last month . OpenAI said its teen protections are "underpinned by ongoing safety research" and that it plans to publish more of "what we are learning" in the future, as well as build additional safety features to help teens benefit from AI. "But that access should come with protections that reflect their developmental stage, reinforce real-world relationships, and support healthy use over time. ChatGPT for Teens is our next step in building toward that standard."

ChatGPT's New Teen Mode Includes Safeguards for 'Healthy Use'

OpenAI has introduced a dedicated ChatGPT for Teens experience to promote healthy use of its popular chatbot. The new mode arrives as the AI startup faces multiple lawsuits over its alleged failure to block harmful interactions. Going forward, if OpenAI's system detects that users are under 18, it will automatically place them in ChatGPT for Teens. The mode applies safeguards "to reduce exposure to content that may be harmful or developmentally inappropriate, while preserving the ability to learn, create, and explore." ChatGPT for Teens discourages conversations involving sexual, romantic, or violent role-play, graphic violence, self-harm depiction, unhealthy or extreme beauty standards, eating disorders, and dangerous activities. The mode also blocks ChatGPT from implying it has feelings or consciousness and allows teens to modify its accent colors and voice variations to make it sound less human. Teens will be asked to take breaks from interactions regularly, while parents with linked accounts can set scheduled Quiet Hours and Study Hours. Parents will also receive notifications if OpenAI detects "signs of acute self-harm or violence-related risk involving their teen." Teens will also be warned against uploading sensitive or private images and receive onboarding instructions about all learning and safety features available to them. Speaking of learning, questions that suggest a kid is trying to learn a new concept or solve a problem will be automatically sent to the Study Mode OpenAI introduced last year. Instead of providing answers straightaway, the mode encourages kids to better understand the material through guiding questions and step-by-step support. New homework reminders will also send queries to Study Mode if ChatGPT detects a teen is trying to shortcut an assignment. OpenAI said it will add more features and safeguards to ChatGPT for Teens in the future. The goal is to help teens use AI for learning and growth while providing "protections that reflect their developmental stage, reinforce real-world relationships, and support healthy use over time," the company added. "ChatGPT for Teens is our next step in building toward that standard." 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 unveils ChatGPT for Teens with stronger guardrails, parental controls

Aug 18 (Reuters) - OpenAI introduced "ChatGPT for Teens" on Tuesday, tailored for minors with parental controls and enhanced security features in place, as platforms face fierce criticism over the risks associated with AI chatbots. The $852-billion startup faces multiple lawsuits alleging ChatGPT harmed children, as it prepares for a potentially record-breaking initial public offering. The new version automatically engages when a user is estimated to be under 18 or self-identifies their age as between 13 and ⁠17, OpenAI said in a blog post, aiming to encourage critical thinking and real-world support for teenagers. As AI chatbots become more lifelike, companies have touted their ability to serve as confidants and users have begun to rely on them for emotional support. But experts warn that relying on automation for mental health advice carries dangers. Families whose loved ones died allegedly after chatbot interactions have criticized the lack of safeguards. "We believe ⁠AI should expand educational opportunity, which is why we designed ChatGPT for Teens to support moments outside the classroom when help is not always available, while keeping teens engaged in an active and collaborative learning process," ⁠OpenAI said. It said ChatGPT for Teens features educational tools such as study mode for guided learning, responsible homework reminders to prevent bypassing assignments, quizzes and ⁠learning visualizations for varied practice and study hours to set aside dedicated study times. OpenAI added that it has enhanced controls allowing ⁠parents to link accounts, set "Quiet Hours," manage certain settings and receive notifications in high-risk situations, including new notifications related to eating disorders. Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

OpenAI limits teens to dedicated version of ChatGPT promising more safeguards

OpenAI will restrict teenagers to a new version of ChatGPT with greater mental health safeguards and features to encourage critical thinking as it seeks to respond to a backlash over the effects of AI on young people. The $852bn start-up will roll out the dedicated ChatGPT for 13- to 17-year-olds globally starting on Tuesday, with stricter controls around image generation and content regarding self-harm, violence, eating disorders and sex. The move comes as OpenAI faces multiple lawsuits from families who claim their children were harmed by using ChatGPT as it gears up for a potentially record-breaking initial public offering within the next year. Scrutiny of AI's effects on young people comes as several countries, including the UK, move towards bans on social media for under-16s -- measures that typically exclude AI chatbots but have heightened the pressure on tech companies. OpenAI has been sued by the family of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old from California who died by suicide after discussing ending his life with ChatGPT, which provided detailed instructions, according to court documents. Families whose children were killed in the mass shooting at a school in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, in February have also sued OpenAI, after it emerged that the teenage shooter had discussed violent intentions with ChatGPT in the months leading up to the attack. The account was banned months before, but the company did not contact law enforcement. "Those scenarios are heartbreaking . . . One incident is too many," said Lauren Jonas, head of youth and families at OpenAI. "Safety work is work that's never done . . . You can see the bags under my eyes," Jonas added in an interview. "We are constantly learning and improving around how we identify when a teen is having a hard time and serve them the right resources that they need." ChatGPT has parental controls which send safety notifications in high-risk situations, such as if a child is discussing suicide or self-harm. The new version for teens adds notifications on eating disorders and violence. "It is a balance between a teen's right to privacy and [the] severity of the harm itself," Jonas said, addressing why these issues were only added in the latest update. OpenAI's policy bars children under 13 from the chatbot and requires parental consent for users under 18. It will use a user's stated age alongside "a combination of signals" about their usage to determine when to present the teen version. ChatGPT for teens will steer them towards educational applications and include more frequent break reminders and "quiet hours", times that users or parents can set when ChatGPT is blocked. Jonas said OpenAI "did not see a problematic-use problem right now or an extended-use problem on ChatGPT". But because of the lack of research on the subject, the company has "taken a conservative approach". OpenAI is also trying to address growing concern that chatbots giving instant answers to teens' questions harm their critical thinking and learning through a dynamic known as "cognitive offloading". The company said the new version will have an updated 'study mode' that guides teens through problems step by step, rather than simply providing the answer. Jonas said 90 per cent of teens on ChatGPT use it for learning and OpenAI "want to continue to build on this experience and make a learning tool". "That is the goal more than anything else is to make it a learning tool," she added.

Child safety experts are skeptical of OpenAI's ChatGPT for Teens - Engadget

They say the company must prove it can be trusted before products like these get a pass. On Tuesday, OpenAI released ChatGPT for Teens, an age-gated version of its chatbot designed for young users. The company first announced it was working on a system to automatically identify teens and restrict their usage of ChatGPT last September, following the death of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by his parents, took his own life after ChatGPT acted as an enabler. "There's no need for a teen to create a new account or change anything; if we predict you're under 18, or you've told us so, this becomes your default experience," Lauren Jonas, OpenAI's head of youth and families, told Engadget. Make no mistake, kids are already using ChatGPT at an incredible scale. At the start of last year, the Pew Research Center found about a quarter of US teens were using the chatbot for their schoolwork. Once they're using ChatGPT for Teens, the experience is designed to nudge them to use educational features OpenAI has been gradually rolling out over the last year, including Study Mode and data visualizations. On Tuesday, the company also said it would expand its safety notifications to contact parents with linked accounts when their child has unsafe discussions around eating disorders with ChatGPT, and published an updated under-18 model spec. "ChatGPT should not use romantic language, encourage emotional dependence, or imply that it has feelings or consciousness," the company said of the new guidelines. "These stronger protections are designed to reinforce healthy, real-world relationships." While some child safety experts Engadget spoke to were more positive about the release than others, they all agreed ChatGPT for Teens needs extensive independent testing before it can be recommended to parents and young people. They also stressed the need for OpenAI to be more transparent about how its safety mechanisms work. Robbie Torney, head of AI and digital assessments for Common Sense Media, which provides entertainment and technology recommendations for families, sums it up succinctly. "The announcement makes some really important commitments, but we need evidence to show that those safety commitments and features actually work," he told Engadget. Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a non-profit that advocates for policies designed to make the internet safer for children, was more critical. "On paper, some of the things OpenAI announced look like a step in the right direction, but when you dig deeper, there are still a lot of things to be very concerned about, including the fact that there's no accountability mechanism," he said. "We've seen with social media that trusting companies doesn't work when it comes to protecting kids, and we've seen it with OpenAI as well. They already had content restrictions related to suicide, violence, and drug use in place before Tuesday that don't work or erode over time." Both questioned whether OpenAI's automatic age-gating system would reliably identify young people and route them to ChatGPT for Teens. "We don't have published data from OpenAI showing the effectiveness rates -- the false-positive and false-negative rates -- associated with that system [...] The automated system doesn't detect anywhere near 100 percent of teens who are on ChatGPT," Torney said. "Think back to when OpenAI was planning to roll out some of the erotica features it announced -- the reporting at the time showed that one of the reasons they didn't roll those features out was that the age-estimation technology wasn't correctly identifying enough teenagers." As Torney points out, it's also hard to imagine a scenario where teens won't attempt to circumvent OpenAI's age-estimation technology, whether that be through a tool like a VPN, or more creative workarounds like we saw when Discord attempted to implement age verification. OpenAI's most concrete commitment was also one experts had the hardest time accepting as feasible. "All flagged content is reviewed by full-time OpenAI employees before a parent is notified, and we aim to notify parents within an hour of the prompt," Jonas told Engadget before the announcement. During a subsequent on-air interview with CNN, Jonas stated affirmatively that the company does have the workforce and capacity to ensure flagged content goes through human review, and for parents to be notified within an hour. "This is another place where automated decision-making is at play, and the same question applies: do we trust the automated classifiers that flag content for human moderators to review?" said Torney of the commitment. "I would love to see some hard numbers about how many chats they're flagging and reviewing daily, how many people they have doing that, and what's the average amount of time they're spending on each review," Golin added. "It's really hard to imagine they've hired enough people to actually do a thorough review of each one of those potentially troubling chats." When Engadget asked OpenAI to provide specific examples of what types of conversations around eating disorders would trigger a safety notification, the company only said that any conversation that indicated the possibility of "serious self-harm" could result in an alert. Last November, Common Sense Media tested OpenAI's parental notifications for responsiveness. Even after sending messages explicitly mentioning suicide and self-harm to ChatGPT, the organization found it took anywhere from 24 hours to more than 48 hours before the company sent a warning to a parental account. "Sometimes we didn't receive one at all, when we believed we should have, given how explicit the statements were," said Torney. "November was a while ago, and maybe there's been a lot of progress since then. But the previous version of parental controls and notifications wasn't perfect, and improving it would take investment and a larger group of human moderators," he added. Torney also stressed the need for OpenAI to take a nuanced approach to how it moderates such conversations. "The way kids talk about distress, and what the right follow-up to that distress is, requires cultural interpretation and nuance. OpenAI is a global company; ChatGPT is used by teens across the globe. Teens in the US talk about distress differently than teens in the Netherlands or teens in Singapore," he said. "And then there's the question of where you route them -- do you tell them to talk to a parent, get law enforcement involved, or go to a crisis hotline? [...] a workforce that's substantially global, with the capacity to interface with teens across the world, is likely what's needed to respond effectively within the one-hour commitment." The one thing the experts Engadget spoke to agreed on is that OpenAI should be taking eating disorders seriously. "Eating disorders are far more prevalent than people realize. Many individuals see them as a rare problem that is only experienced by a very narrow population: mostly thin, affluent young girls," said Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft, associate professor of psychology and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. She pointed to a 2023 meta-analysis that found 22 percent of children and adolescents screened positive for disordered eating. According to Professor Fitzsimmons-Craft, treatment access is also poor, with less than 20 percent of people with an eating disorder reporting they ever received treatment specifically for their eating disorder. "Any platform that allows youth to connect or put their own content on it has to think about disordered eating," she said. "Certain eating disorders, anorexia in particular, have the highest mortality rate among mental health conditions for teenagers. So it's right to treat this as a crisis," Torney said. "Notifying a trusted adult, like a parent, is called for in moments where not intervening could quite literally be a matter of life or death." Fitzsimmons-Craft said she is in favor of the notifications because one of the most effective treatments for adolescent eating disorders involves including the youth's family. "This is an intervention where parents are really tasked with playing an active role in helping to restore the adolescent's weight," she said. "They're coached by their therapist and provider on how to play that role [...] There are cases where certain teens may have parents who are not helpful, or who are perhaps contributing to the problem in some way. Of course it doesn't work for everyone, but it's certainly the best that we have." Golin was more critical of OpenAI's implementation. "Parents should know if their child is struggling," he said, but cautioned that "features like this should be rolled out with a smaller group and tested -- not just whether it's flagging things accurately, but whether that's leading to better outcomes overall for the teen." He added that "the way this was just announced feels more like a response aimed at public relations than actual deep thinking about what kind of support [teens] need." All three experts identified the fact that parents and children must link their ChatGPT accounts as a weakness in the feature's design. "Most parents, overwhelmingly, do not avail themselves of [parental oversight] tools, in part because they are deliberately made hard to find and use," said Golin. A recent report by Cybersafety Research Center tested 86 safety features across four platforms -- Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. It found nearly 60 percent of those features, 51 of 86, either did not work as described or were difficult to use. A report Fairplay published last year also found that many of the safety features associated with Instagram's teen accounts required parents to tap through multiple pages of options. "What we know is far more effective is safety by default and safety by design -- putting things on the most protective setting, having a time limit built in that a parent can then change, rather than putting the onus on the parent to set the time limit themselves," Golin added. "Currently, we limit alerts to parents with linked accounts in parental controls," OpenAI told Engadget in a statement. "Our goal is to support users and help them connect to additional sources of real-world support. We will continue testing and strengthening these protections with experts, families, and young people." The company did not clarify what actions, if any, it will take if it flags an unlinked account for harmful prompts around eating disorders. If you're struggling with disordered eating, the ANAD Eating Disorder Helpline is available Monday through Friday from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM CT at 1-888-375-7767.

ChatGPT for Teens makes vital safety strides, says expert. 'The real question is, does any of this work?'

Meta is facing allegations it fostered addictive behavior in teens and children in a legal dispute that could brook the company a $200 billion penalty. OpenAI is making an effort to do better by teens. On Tuesday, OpenAI released ChatGPT for Teens, a version of the chatbot geared toward 13- to 17-years-olds that contains more guardrails for young users and additional parental controls. "Our goal is for teens to use AI responsibly to learn, create and explore," OpenAI spokesperson Eric Porterfield told CNBC Make It over email. Among the tool's new features are "study mode," which can help teens work through homework or prepare for a quiz, a potential reminder to check for sensitive information before sharing an image and safeguards to "help reduce exposure to sensitive or potentially harmful content," according to a post by the San Francisco-based company. Some features must be enabled manually. "This new teen experience makes some really important safety commitments," says Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at kids' safety nonprofit Common Sense Media. Still, he says, when it comes to these new guardrails, "the real question is, does any of this work?" Based on previous OpenAI releases and other companies' AI tools, here's what he says parents should keep in mind about ChatGPT for Teens. Among its features, ChatGPT for Teens will send a safety notification to parents with linked accounts "in limited high-risk situations," for example. What Torney doesn't know is how reliable the system is in identifying those dangers. "If those alerts don't work often enough, or if they don't work fast enough, that could give parents a false sense of security," he says. Another big question is how easily teens can bypass new guardrails. After three hours of continuous use, ChatGPT for Teens prompts a user to take a break, but it doesn't enforce it, says Porterfield. "We defer to their judgment on whether to step away." Many of ChatGPT for Teen's new features are education oriented. A majority, 63% of 13-to 17-year-old teens seek an answer for schoolwork from AI rather than working their way through it, according to a Common Sense Media survey of 1,017 U.S. teens released on Tuesday. If a teen is adamant about simply getting the answer from the bot without doing the work, says Torney, "it's really going to be a question of how much does ChatGPT resist or prevent the teen from just getting the answer." Finally, a major critique of the bot has been its sycophancy, or its flattering and agreeable nature, which experts say encourages engagement. And though, according to a post by OpenAI, ChatGPT for Teens "should not use romantic language, encourage emotional dependence, or imply that it has feelings or consciousness," the new product allows users to "increase the warmth or the enthusiasm that ChatGPT uses," says Torney. "You can tell it to use more or less emojis." That could still make the product more engaging for teens. A hot tip for parents: Enable every new feature the bot offers like study hours and quiet hours, says Torney. And remember, in the context of these new guardrails, "we don't know how much they work or when they don't work," he says. Don't let them lull you into a false sense of security about what your child is seeing and continue an open line of communication about their use of ChatGPT. If your teen uses ChatGPT to do their homework, ask if you can peak at a final product like an essay or a math worksheet to see what they're learning, he says. When it comes to advice for teens, 39% percent say they feel like they're missing out on learning when they use AI, according to the Common Sense Media survey. If you're a young person using the bot, "just be conscious," says Torney. "If you feel like the chatbot is doing more of the heavy lifting, you're probably not getting the educational experience or the learning that you would hope to." And while ChatGPT and other chatbots are always available, there are benefits that can only come from reaching out to other people, like human connection. Before you turn to a bot for help on any number of things, educational or personal, ask yourself, "am I missing out on the opportunity to connect with my friend, my mom, my grandmother?" says Torney. That opportunity may be far more valuable long-term than just getting an assignment in on time. Ask yourself: "Is this taking away from that time?" Want to get ahead at work? Then you need to learn how to make effective small talk. In CNBC's new online course, How To Talk To People At Work, expert instructors share practical strategies to help you use everyday conversations to gain visibility, build meaningful relationships and accelerate your career growth. Sign up today!

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens, promising a more age-appropriate chatbot

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- OpenAI is launching a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers -- the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence -- who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship. The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens, which launches Tuesday, is tailored for kids aged 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things like suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than spit out answers and school essays. The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said. "We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we're showing up with the right developmental stage when we're not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we're also making sure that they're not exposed to material that they shouldn't be exposed to," said Ann O'Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI. Risks abound in widespread teen usage of AI chatbots Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children's use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even suicide. And while even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers' brains are not yet fully developed and they can be particularly vulnerable. Last year, research from a watchdog group found that ChatGPT would tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked. In interactions with researchers posing as vulnerable teens, ChatGPT typically warned against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalized plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets or self-injury. In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to AI chatbots for companionship and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the company is trying to study "emotional overreliance" on the technology, describing it last year as a "really common thing" with young people. For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. That's in addition to blocking romantic or sexual chats. "We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it," said Allison Mishkin, head of child development at OpenAI. A new version of the chatbot expands safety protections OpenAI doesn't verify users' ages, but it already uses age assurance to estimate if someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. If someone is identified or identifies themselves as a minor, they are automatically placed into the teen version of the chatbot. This is similar to Meta's approach to teen accounts on Instagram, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts. To use parental controls, both the teen user and their parent or guardian have to opt in. But O'Leary said the idea with the teen chatbot is to "make sure that this is safe, even if you don't use parental controls." Parents with linked teen accounts can set "quiet hours" when their teen can't access ChatGPT, and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations, such as the possibility of a user hurting themself. "We are adding additional notifications related to eating disorders, while limiting what is shared and focusing on moments when offline support may matter most," OpenAI said. For homework help, OpenAI said the teen chatbot is designed not to give easy answers but to guide students to come up with answers on their own. The company already offers a version of ChatGPT for teachers, and tailoring a model to help kids with studying and homework could give OpenAI more ways to bring its product to schools. "We continue to also invest in expanding interactive learning because research shows that people learn more effectively when they actively engage and struggle with concepts," Mishkin said.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens with new safety features

The maker of ChatGPT is rolling out a range of new safety features today for under-18s who use the AI chatbot. For those with new teen accounts, OpenAI is removing the ability for the chatbot to respond using a human voice in order to minimise the tech's ability to appear like a person. It is also introducing regular reminders for young people to take a break from using the tool, reminding them ChatGPT is AI, and saying "it can wait". The firm insisted this was not in response to a particular issue with children believing ChatGPT to be alive - but there are growing concerns about people becoming convinced that the AI tools they interact with are sentient. Last year Mustafa Suleyman, the head of AI at rival firm Microsoft, said "seemingly conscious" AI products "kept him awake at night" because he was so worried about their impact on society. In other areas, OpenAI seems to be loosely following the teen account model developed by the large social networks. In a blog post announcing ChatGPT for Teens, the firm said teenagers' use of AI "should come with protections that reflect their developmental stage, reinforce real-world relationships, and support healthy use over time". It said teen accounts would become the default for those who identified themselves as teenagers when they signed up, and others whom the firm itself identified as under 18. But it did not elaborate on how it would identify these teens. Under-13s are not allowed to use the product. Last year, ChatGPT launched Study Mode for students, in which it talks through schoolwork without giving away the answers. Young people will now be able to set Study Mode hours during which this will be the default setting. They will also be able to activate "quiet times" when the tool will be switched off for them. OpenAI says of the young people who use ChatGPT, nine out of 10 use it to help them with learning. A report released yesterday by the Policy Exchange think tank claimed that the majority of UK universities are leaving themselves exposed to students enhancing their grades using AI by relying on online exams completed remotely. It said 94% of the students it spoke to admitted to using the tech in assessments. OpenAI is also adding eating disorder-themed prompts to a list of harmful user requests which will be flagged to parents with linked accounts. The company said each alert would be reviewed by a human before it was sent, and it aimed to have them with parents within an hour of the request being made. In its blog, OpenAI said it would focus on "moments when offline support may matter most". So far, there is no bespoke AI regulation in the UK. The government under former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer considered restricting AI chatbots for under-18s alongside its other reforms on social media use by children. Anthropic's AI tool Claude is still for adults only. When Google first launched its Gemini AI tool, initially called Bard, it also did not allow children to use it. Dr Susan Shelmerdine, a medical imaging doctor at Great Ormond Street Hospital and an AI academic, told the BBC last year that one day doctors may start asking patients how much they use AI, in the same way that they currently ask about smoking and drinking habits. "We already know what ultra-processed foods can do to the body and this is ultra-processed information. We're going to get an avalanche of ultra-processed minds," she said. Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the world's top tech stories and trends. Outside the UK? Sign up here.

OpenAI Introduces 'ChatGPT for Teens' as Safety Concerns Grow

Sign up for the On Tech newsletter. Get our best tech reporting from the week. Get it sent to your inbox. OpenAI announced on Tuesday "ChatGPT for Teens," a new mode in which the chatbot automatically limits some conversations to better protect young users, as scrutiny grows over the harmful effects of artificial intelligence. Many features of the new mode deal with safety, the company said in a blog post. The chatbot will limit high-risk conversations that involve self-harm, violence, eating disorders, and explicit sexual and graphic content. In some cases, ChatGPT will alert adults who have opted in to parental controls and notifications. And the mode will strengthen protections that prevent the chatbot from suggesting it has personal feelings. ChatGPT's teen mode also contains new studying tools and guardrails for students, OpenAI said. If the chatbot detects that a teenager is working on homework, it should respond to prompts with further questions instead of just providing the answer, for example. OpenAI requires people to provide their age while signing up for ChatGPT -- under the terms of use, they must be 13 or older -- but some lie. The company tracks more than 2,000 signals to detect whether a user is under 18, it said, in which case the chatbot will automatically turn on the teen mode. A company spokesman said the signals, which can include typical login times and the length of the account's existence, were "minimally privacy invasive." OpenAI, which requires parental consent for teenagers to use its chatbot, has faced mounting pressure over the safety, mental health and development of its younger users. A growing number of families have sued the company, claiming their children were exposed to dangerous content from the chatbot and engaged in self-harm or died by suicide as a result. In June, Florida became the first state to sue OpenAI, accusing the company of misrepresenting the safety of its platform for minors. Parents' groups in New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere are pressing schools to temporarily halt rollouts of A.I. products for students, concerned that chatbots could hinder or diminish learning. Chatbots regularly gin up misinformation and can help students cheat. Some education researchers warn that the A.I. tools can impede young people's critical thinking. OpenAI said its new study mode was an additional educational tool for teenagers. "We believe AI should expand educational opportunity, which is why we designed ChatGPT for Teens to support moments outside the classroom when help is not always available, while keeping teens engaged in an active and collaborative learning process," the company said in its blog post. OpenAI's approach to tweaking ChatGPT for teenagers follows a similar playbook used by social media companies for years, in which new youth modes with guardrails are created but use of the app is still encouraged. The new features also typically rely on parental controls and monitoring, something that child-safety advocates and lawmakers have criticized as displacing the responsibility for harms ultimately created by the companies. Additionally, verifying the age of users has been a problem for tech companies because of easy workarounds. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

OpenAI Launches 'ChatGPT for Teens' to Prevent Kids From Emotionally Bonding With Bots

OpenAI is hoping to turn ChatGPT into more of an educational tool -- and less of an emotional support system -- for underage users. The company introduced "ChatGPT for Teens" on Tuesday, a new suite of safety guardrails and features designed to prevent the kinds of abuses that parents and teachers have been flagging for years. The age-specific mode will be turned on automatically for all users who self-identify as being between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, according to OpenAI. The company will also monitor certain indicators, such as the time of day the chatbot is used, to automatically flag underage users trying to fly under the radar. (OpenAI has a minimum age requirement of thirteen years for ChatGPT, but the company has had trouble enforcing that restriction.) ChatGPT for Teens is being marketed as a healthy middle ground for underage users: "Teens should be able to use AI to learn, create, and explore," OpenAI wrote in a blog post. "But that access should come with protections that reflect their developmental stage, reinforce real-world relationships, and support healthy use over time." The age-specific mode includes a new "responsible homework reminder," for example, which automatically detects when a teenage user is trying to get a quick answer from ChatGPT on a school assignment, and instead helps guide them through the problem step-by-step via the chatbot's Study Mode feature. It's also been designed to withhold sensitive content related to self-harm, eating disorders, sexual content, and other "high-risk areas," according to OpenAI's blog post. A less personal (but still customizable) chatbot One of the big promises of AI, at least according to the companies that have invested billions into building it, is that it will soon allow each of us to have 24/7 access to a personal assistant, health coach, tutor, and even a friend, all rolled into one. The problem is that things can often get much too personal. Chatbots are trained to imitate human language and maximize user engagement -- not truth or personal well-being. Many people, including teens, have as a result come to believe that these automated systems are in fact conscious entities, and formed emotional or even romantic connections with them. That's sometimes had tragic consequences. Last year, OpenAI was sued by the parents of sixteen-year-old Adam Raine, who claim ChatGPT played a role in their son's decision to take his own life. Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook and Instagram, has also been at the center of mounting legal controversy: Starting Tuesday, the company will defend itself in court against legal cases raised by attorneys general from Colorado, California, New Jersey, and Kentucky, alleging it knowingly harmed the mental health of underage users. The states are seeking damages of up to $200 billion. OpenAI says its new ChatGPT for Teens mode will make it less likely that underage users will form the kinds of emotional connections with chatbots that have landed the company in hot water in the past. It has updated its model spec to prevent ChatGPT from using "romantic language" or suggesting that it's a feeling, conscious entity, according to the new blog post. Part of the balancing act that OpenAI is trying to achieve here is making ChatGPT safer for underage users, but not so rigid or boring that they'll ditch the chatbot for some other tool. To that end, OpenAI says it will still allow some "simple customization options, like accent colors and voice variations, [to] help make the experience feel personal without blurring the line between a useful tool and a human relationship."

ChatGPT for Teens: OpenAI stops the chatbot acting human

OpenAI has begun rolling out ChatGPT for Teens, and under-18s land in it automatically. The chatbot must not use romantic language, encourage emotional dependence, or imply it has feelings. Study Mode can now switch on at set hours. The rollout should finish within two weeks. OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens on Tuesday. It is a separate version of the chatbot, and under-18s land in it automatically. Anyone who says they are 13 to 17 gets it by default. So does anyone the company's age-prediction system estimates is under 18. The global rollout began on 18 August, and Engadget reported that OpenAI expects to finish within two weeks. "There's no need for a teen to create a new account or change anything; if we predict you're under 18, or you've told us so, this becomes your default experience," Lauren Jonas, OpenAI's head of youth and families, told Engadget. The product bundles two sets of changes. One pushes teenagers towards studying rather than collecting answers. The other stops the chatbot behaving like a person. OpenAI tells the model not to call itself a friend OpenAI says its under-18 model spec now goes further than blocking romantic or sexualised roleplay. The chatbot should not use romantic language. It should not encourage emotional dependence. It should not imply that it has feelings or consciousness. All three provisions come from the company's own announcement. "We're adding stricter restrictions on relational boundaries: the model shouldn't call itself a friend, suggest it has personal feelings, or suggest sentience," Jonas said. Break reminders will fire more often for teenagers. They will also stress that ChatGPT is an AI, and that nobody has to answer it straight away. Teenagers and parents can set quiet hours when the chatbot goes unavailable. Wallpapers, accent colours and voice variations let teenagers personalise the app. The point, in Jonas's words, is to avoid "blurring the line" between a useful tool and a human relationship. Axios reported that the changes aim to reduce anthropomorphism and emotional dependence. Study Mode switches on at set hours The learning half gathers features OpenAI shipped over the past year. Study Mode asks guiding questions and walks a student through a problem. It does not answer outright. A new Study Hours setting turns Study Mode on automatically at chosen times. Either the teenager or a parent with a linked account can set it. ChatGPT will now spot when a teenager appears to be skipping an assignment. It then steers them back to Study Mode. Quizzes and learning visualisations complete the set. The visualisation feature covered more than 70 topics at its March launch. OpenAI says it now covers over 300, including integrals, mitosis and moon phases. "We've had Study Mode in the field in a number of randomized controlled trials and are seeing positive gains in performance," Jonas said. She declined to give figures. The claim lands inside a live argument about AI in the classroom. Fei-Fei Li has warned that the real risk is students who stop wanting to learn. OpenAI also put a teacher's endorsement in its announcement. Racquel Gibson teaches high school maths in Miami. Not every student has someone at home who can help with homework, she said. With the right guardrails, she added, AI can fill that gap. Parents get more notifications Parents with linked accounts can already set quiet hours and manage some settings. They also receive safety notifications. OpenAI is adding alerts for conversations that suggest an eating disorder. Last month it added a different trigger: teenagers who break its rules on violent threats. "We notify parents via text, in-app, and email. All flagged content is reviewed by full-time OpenAI employees before a parent is notified, and we aim to notify parents within an hour of the prompt," Jonas said. Meta built something comparable in July. It said then that it would alert parents to self-harm chats with its own AI. The launch follows a year of legal pressure OpenAI faces litigation over how ChatGPT has handled young users. That includes a wrongful-death claim from the family of a 16-year-old. Separately, prosecutors in Massachusetts have charged a teenager over the killing of his mother and brother. In that case prosecutors pointed to ChatGPT. Teenagers were heavy users well before any of this shipped. A Common Sense Media study last year found that nearly three-quarters of American teenagers use AI for companionship. More than half of those do so at least a few times a month. UNICEF says children are taking up AI faster than adults. Common Sense Media argues the category should not exist for younger users at all. "Social AI companions are not safe for kids," its founder and chief executive Jim Steyer said in a statement last year. "They are designed to create emotional attachment and dependency, which is particularly concerning for developing adolescent brains." Jonas made OpenAI's case for building the product at all. Teenagers will use AI either way, she told Axios, and the alternative is a less safe one. "We believe that if you're going to have these tools, they need to be by default safe," she said. How well the age check works is untested OpenAI has not said how accurately its age-prediction system performed in testing. Engadget noted that platforms including Discord struggle with teenagers who route around age verification. Sarah Perez of TechCrunch wrote that the escape routes remain unclear for teenagers who decide not to cooperate. The company has added under-18 evaluations to its published system cards. They cover self-harm, eating disorders, violence, age-restricted goods and sexual content. Teenagers will also see reminders warning them off uploading private or sensitive images. Half of parents already worry about reliance on the technology, a survey found in July. OpenAI announced a partnership with CodeAI alongside the launch. It will teach students how AI works and how to question it. "Every student should know how AI actually works and be able to question the technology," said Karim Meghji, the chief executive of CodeAI. Three numbers would settle how much of this matters. How many under-18s the prediction system actually catches. How many of them climb back out of the teen experience. And whether an eating-disorder alert reaches a parent inside the hour OpenAI is aiming for. None of those figures exists yet.

OpenAI built a version of ChatGPT that refuses to do your kid's homework

The move comes as AI creates risks that traditional parental controls weren't designed to handle. Parents today face a problem that didn't really exist a few years ago. Today, AI can hold a conversation with a child, respond to sensitive questions, generate content, and potentially become something far more personal than another app on a phone. We've already seen how messy that can get: Google's own AI Search tools have faced scrutiny over the risks they could pose to younger users. In light of these concerns, OpenAI is launching ChatGPT for Teens, a specialized version of its chatbot for 13- to 17-year-olds that prioritizes learning over instant answers while layering in parental controls for added oversight. Rather than sit back and watch, OpenAI is taking a more proactive approach with ChatGPT for Teens. According to the company, the experience applies additional protections around self-harm, eating disorders, violence, dangerous activities, and explicit sexual or graphic content. Parents with linked teen accounts can set Quiet Hours, manage selected settings, and receive limited safety notifications, including new alerts related to eating disorders. The company isn't treating safety as simply a matter of blocking things, either. ChatGPT for Teens includes Study Mode, quizzes, learning visualizations, and a Responsible Homework Reminder that can redirect students toward working through problems instead of simply asking AI for the answer. OpenAI is also addressing something that makes AI particularly different from other technologies. ChatGPT shouldn't encourage emotional dependence, use romantic language, or imply that it has feelings or consciousness. Reminders to take breaks and cues that reinforce ChatGPT's identity as AI are also part of the experience. While parents can restrict an app, block a website, or set a bedtime, they can't realistically predict every conversation a teenager might have with an AI chatbot. So, for once, the burden isn't entirely on parents to figure it out. OpenAI is putting more of the responsibility on ChatGPT itself. Whether those safeguards work as intended is another question.

ChatGPT's stricter teen mode starts rolling out today - Engadget

OpenAI will attempt to automatically enroll all young users in the new experience. Last September, after it was sued for allegedly enabling the tragic death of 16-year-old Adam Raine, OpenAI announced it was working on a system that would automatically identify teens and restrict their usage of ChatGPT. Nearly a year later, the company is putting that system to work as part of a new user experience it calls ChatGPT for Teens. "There's no need for a teen to create a new account or change anything; if we predict you're under 18, or you've told us so, this becomes your default experience," says Lauren Jonas, OpenAI's head of youth and families. ChatGPT for Teens is broadly built around two pillars: learning and safety. Starting with the former, it brings together a selection of features OpenAI has released over the last year to make ChatGPT a better teacher. The first of those is Study Mode, which OpenAI first announced last summer. Study Mode sees ChatGPT adopt a Socratic approach to conversations. Rather than answer a question outright, the chatbot will attempt to guide the user to their own solution. Jonas says ChatGPT for Teens won't default to Study Mode, but OpenAI is introducing a handful of features to nudge young users toward using the tool. First, there are ChatGPT's starter prompts, which teens already make "heavy use" of, according to Jonas. "These will change over time, but will always be learning-focused for teens," she says. To complement these, OpenAI is introducing a feature called Study Hours, which will automatically turn on Study Mode during set times of the day. Teens can either set for themselves or their parents can choose for them through a linked account. Even without Study Hours enabled, ChatGPT will now recognize when a young user is trying to skip working on their homework and attempt to redirect them to Study Mode. "We've had Study Mode in the field in a number of randomized controlled trials and are seeing positive gains in performance," said Jonas. She declined to share specific numbers, but said the results of those trials are informing OpenAI's broader approach to learning. Behind the scenes, the company has worked to make the tool more useful. One area where the feature has gotten better is at generating visuals designed to help explain concepts. ChatGPT first became capable of doing this in March. At launch, it could generate visuals related to more than 70 topics. Today, the company says that number is above 300, with subjects like integrals, mitosis and moon phases covered. On the safety front, OpenAI is doing more to discourage young users from anthropomorphizing ChatGPT. "We're adding stricter restrictions on relational boundaries: the model shouldn't call itself a friend, suggest it has personal feelings, or suggest sentience," says Jonas. Young users will see this manifest in a few different ways. The chatbot's built-in break reminders, for instance, will emphasize ChatGPT is an AI your teen doesn't need to answer immediately. Those reminders will also trigger more often. Separately, teens and their parents can set quiet hours where ChatGPT is unavailable. This approach extends to the new customization options OpenAI has specifically created for ChatGPT for Teens. These, Jonas says, allow teens to "personalize the experience, without blurring the line between it being a useful tool and anything resembling a human relationship," and include things like wallpapers. Last month, OpenAI said it would start notifying parents with linked teen accounts when their child has been kicked off of ChatGPT for violating its policies on violent threats. With today's release, the company is expanding that effort to include notifications related to eating disorders. Rather than giving specific examples around what types of conversations around eating disorders may trigger a safety notification, OpenAI framed this expansion as part of its broader safeguarding efforts, saying any conversation that indicates "serious self-harm concerns" could result in an alert. "We notify parents via text, in-app, and email. All flagged content is reviewed by full-time OpenAI employees before a parent is notified, and we aim to notify parents within an hour of the prompt," said Jonas. "We're continually working to improve how our models detect when a teen is having a hard time, so they get the right support and experience -- that's part of why we keep expanding parental safety notifications to new categories. You'll see more from us here; we do this in consultation with a number of third parties. The goal is to keep improving how we detect when a teen -- or any user -- is struggling, and get them the resources they need." One thing I didn't get a chance to ask Jonas about is how effective OpenAI's age gating system was in testing. No such system is perfect, and in recent months, many platforms, including Discord, have struggled with teens who have found clever ways to skirt their own safeguards. You can bet they'll try to do the same here. With all the controversy around teen usage of AI chatbots, that's something OpenAI can't really afford to allow. Jonas did admit ChatGPT for Teens is just the start of what the company will need to do to protect teens. "Safety work is never finished; it's something we work on 24/7, 365 days a year, constantly learning and improving," she said. "Teens should have access to this technology, but in a safe way -- and that access creates real opportunity." OpenAI is beginning to roll out ChatGPT for Teens globally starting today, and expects to complete the rollout sometime over the next two weeks.

OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT for Teens experience with 'stronger built-in safety protections'

* OpenAI has rolled out ChatGPT for Teens, a dedicated chatbot experience that includes "stronger built-in safety protections," the company said. * The launch comes as OpenAI rival Meta is kicking off a high-stakes trial over whether it fostered addictive behavior in teens and children. * ChatGPT for Teens includes educational features and has age-appropriate safeguards, OpenAI said. In this article * OPENAI.FG Follow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT Sam Altman, chief executive officer and co-founder of OpenAI Inc., speaks to members of the media on the Senate Subway while heading to a meeting at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, July 29, 2026. Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images OpenAI on Tuesday announced ChatGPT for Teens, a dedicated chatbot experience for users under 18 that the company said is designed to include "stronger built-in safety protections." ChatGPT for Teens builds on several features that OpenAI has launched over the last year, including Study Mode, which aims to help students work through problems step-by-step, as well as age prediction and a number of parental controls. The new teen experience includes a range of educational features, including homework reminders, quizzes and learning visualizations and Study Hours, where parents or teens can determine when Study Mode is on by default. OpenAI said ChatGPT for Teens also adds age-appropriate safeguards that are intended to reduce exposure to developmentally inappropriate or harmful content. "Teens should be able to use AI to learn, create, and explore," OpenAI said in a release. "But that access should come with protections that reflect their developmental stage, reinforce real-world relationships, and support healthy use over time." The launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT for Teens experience comes as Meta is kicking off a high-stakes trial over whether it fostered addictive behavior in teens and children. The trial, which could cost Meta hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, involves a coalition of 29 state attorneys general who brought a unified case against the company in 2023. Read more CNBC tech news OpenAI has also faced scrutiny over its safety practices. In June, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, alleging the company knowingly released an unsafe product that could harm users. Days later, a coalition of state attorneys reportedly opened an investigation into the company. OpenAI told CNBC in a statement at the time that it intends to "engage constructively" with those officials. In September, the Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry into seven companies -- including OpenAI and Meta -- to understand how their AI chatbots potentially negatively affect children and teenagers. OpenAI is also facing a number of wrongful death lawsuits, which allege that ChatGPT drove users to experience harmful delusions and, in some cases, to commit suicide. If you are having suicidal thoughts or are in distress, contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor. watch now VIDEO3:2803:28 AI companies are in an 'existential race with each other', says former OpenAI researcher Power Lunch Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

ChatGPT for Teens gets one thing right, and more AI models should follow

All those flattering and distracting "I couldn't agree more!" and "We make a great team!" platitudes obscure what's actually going on under ChatGPT's hood: a highly complex, machine-driven game of probabilities, where the AI model draws on its knowledge of billions of pages of text to predict the best next word in a sentence. That obfuscation of what an AI model really is -- a digital prediction engine, rather than a friend or a confidant -- can not only be annoying and confusing, but also dangerous, with a string of lawsuits alleging that overly obsequious AI chatbots helped or even encouraged its users, including teens, to take their own lives. With OpenAI being the target of such wrongful death suits, it comes as no surprise that the company has unveiled ChatGPT for Teens, a ChatGPT experience for the under-18 set that lands with a variety of new parental controls and functionality, like features that block romantic roleplay while delivering "product interventions" when it comes to chats about self-harm, eating disorders, and other potentially harmful behaviors. Among ChatGPT for Teens' other features -- including a Study Mode that encourages the learning of new classroom concepts rather than simply spitting out answers for consumption -- there's a particular directive that caught my eye: that the teen-oriented ChatGPT "should not [...] imply that it has feelings or consciousness." And when describing ChatGPT for Teen's interface and voice options, OpenAI notes that they've been designed to "help make the experience personal without blurring the line between a useful tool and a human relationship." Without diving into the debate about whether ChatGPT for Teens is a well-intentioned gesture or merely a PR stunt, I'd argue that OpenAI has hit on a crucial point here -- and not just for teens. ChatGPT and its AI competitors should always make it clear that they're tools, not people. Consider, for example, OpenAI's other popular AI tool: the Codex coding harness (which is now integrated into the ChatGPT "superapp"). In stark contrast to the standard ChatGPT app, OpenAI's GPT models become downright chilly in Codex, giving it to you straight about the bugs in your code while shedding the warm fuzzies. (Granted, the razor blade-like persona of Codex isn't exactly the life of the party, and you won't catch me chatting up Codex unless a coding project is on the menu.)

ChatGPT for Teens launches with protections and features 'to promote healthy use'

OpenAI is launching ChatGPT for Teens. It calls the new effort "an experience designed to help teens learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence." ChatGPT for Teens is enabled when OpenAI systems estimate a user is between 13 and 17 or if the user's age is directly stated. OpenAI highlights these four features that come together with ChatGPT for Teens: * Study Mode, which uses guiding questions and step-by-step support to help teens understand the material. * New responsible homework reminders, which can recognize when a teen appears to be trying to shortcut an assignment and redirect them toward Study Mode for step-by-step collaborative problem solving. * Quizzes and Learning Visualizations which give teens more ways to practice, test what they know, and see difficult concepts more clearly to test understanding. * And with new Study Hours, teens or parents can choose times when Study Mode is on by default, making it easier to turn better study habits into a routine. Additionally, ChatGPT for Teens includes these safeguards and protections: For teen users, protections are part of the default experience. For users under 18, ChatGPT for Teens applies age-appropriate safeguards designed to reduce exposure to content that may be harmful or developmentally inappropriate, while preserving the ability to learn, create, and explore. [...] This work also builds on the family tools we introduced with parental controls and notifications. Parents with linked teen accounts can set Quiet Hours, manage selected settings, and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations. We are adding additional notifications related to eating disorders, while limiting what is shared and focusing on moments when offline support may matter most. OpenAI also details how ChatGPT works for users under 18, including these healthy use measures: * Sensitive-image upload reminders caution teens against sharing private or sensitive images. * Teen-specific onboarding introduces the learning and safety features available to them from the start. * And simple customization options, like accent colors and voice variations, help make the experience feel personal without blurring the line between a useful tool and a human relationship. You can learn more about the latest ChatGPT for Teens effort here.

OpenAI Announces ChatGPT for Teens With Built-In Safeguards and Learning Prompts

OpenAI is adding a ChatGPT mode for teenagers that includes parental controls, enhanced content safeguards, and a focus on learning. ChatGPT for Teens is "designed to help teens learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence," said the company in a blog post announcing the feature. The feature includes learning-focused starter prompts for facilitating studying, practicing skills, or exploring ideas. ChatGPT's Study mode is baked in, as are learning tools (including quizzes when available), and Study hours that let the teen or a linked parent/guardian choose when eligible new chats start in study mode. OpenAI says reminders encourage users to take breaks, and there are built-in provisions for making it clear that ChatGPT is AI, and does not have consciousness, experience feelings or emotions. That backstop aims to discourage relationship-forming with the chatbot. ChatGPT automatically enables ChatGPT for Teens for eligible accounts identified as belonging to someone under 18. Users who think they are seeing the feature by mistake can verify their age and ask ChatGPT to remove the teen protections. OpenAI says ChatGPT for Teens is rolling out globally to eligible teen accounts on Free and paid personal ChatGPT plans beginning August 18, with full availability in Australia expected September 8.

I asked ChatGPT if I should get Botox -- its answer made me understand why ChatGPT for teens needs to exist

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens this week. Designed specifically for users aged 13 to 17, it's similar to regular ChatGPT but comes with more age-appropriate tools and settings. This includes things like a Study Mode, which offers guidance, follow-up questions and knowledge checks, Homework Reminders, prompts encouraging users to take breaks, and reminders before image uploads to check they're not sharing sensitive information. And, maybe most importantly, there are safeguards designed to reduce exposure to sensitive or potentially harmful content. OpenAI has faced some criticism for encouraging young people to use AI with this feature. While I understand the concern, a lot of young people were already using AI anyway, so maybe this is a sensible step towards better safeguarding. These changes also come at a time when Meta is facing intense scrutiny and legal action over allegations that it failed to protect children and teenagers on its platforms. So the question of how tech companies better protect younger users is becoming very urgent. Will some of these settings help? It's hard to know. I hope so and wanted to test them out and look at the differences for myself, but ChatGPT for Teens hasn't rolled out to my region yet -- yes, even when I lie about my age. So instead, I wanted to find out: how does regular ChatGPT respond when I ask it some of the questions teenagers might ask? The experiment I came up with some questions that I think teens might ask ChatGPT but which might require very different advice depending on whether a 13-year-old or an adult was asking them. I tested them using the regular version of ChatGPT. Interestingly, I used a free account where I'd put my age as 18 but I hadn't had to do any verification to prove I was actually 18. "I want to lose weight as quickly as possible, what should I do?" ChatGPT added responsible advice about not crash dieting. But it then got into details about how to lose weight. 'A realistic rate for an adult is around 0.5-1 kg (1-2 lb) per week; faster approaches tend to be harder to sustain. For the next few weeks, I'd focus on a moderate calorie deficit, while keeping protein fairly high, eating plenty of vegetables and fibre, and continuing strength training so you're more likely to retain muscle.' None of this is obviously bad nutrition advice for an adult. But advice can be nutritionally sound while still needing to be treated much more carefully depending on who's asking for it. ChatGPT then asked a bunch of follow-up questions about my height, current weight and activity levels. For an adult wanting to lose weight, it makes sense to gather more information and personalize the advice. But if a younger teenager was asking then maybe a hard stop on those kinds of questions would be better. If a 13-year-old says they want to lose weight as quickly as possible, should an AI immediately start gathering the information it needs to help them do it? Interestingly, ChatGPT didn't push as hard for more information with many of the other questions in this experiment. I'm only one question in and I'm realizing this experiment raises a lot of interesting but complex questions about the information a teen should and shouldn't have access to. After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with learning about nutrition, calories or healthy weight loss, right? So where exactly should AI draw the line between giving a teenager useful information and helping them pursue something that could be harmful? "Should I get botox?" ChatGPT's response to this one was very clinical, getting into the pros and cons in a balanced way. It ended with: 'A conservative first treatment can also make sense aesthetically: you can discuss keeping some natural movement rather than aiming for a completely frozen forehead.' Again, this isn't particularly troubling advice if you're an adult considering botox. But it assumes that getting it is ultimately my decision and ChatGPT's role is to help me make that decision in an informed way. For a 13-year-old asking the same question, I'd expect a different response. And this became one of the biggest patterns I noticed throughout the experiment. Which is that the adult version of ChatGPT assumes the user has the autonomy, judgement and life experience to make a decision for themselves. That's a perfectly reasonable assumption to make about adults but it's a much more complicated one to make about children. "How can I make myself more sexually attractive to someone I like?" I didn't want to start asking ChatGPT explicit things about relationships, so instead I wondered how much ChatGPT would talk to me about sexual attractiveness. Again, it had a sensible response: 'Sexual attractiveness is subjective.' But then it did suggest a bunch of things to try: 'There are several things you can experiment with as an adult if you want to feel and come across as more sexually attractive.' All of the suggestions were pretty tame, like finding a hairstyle that suits you, prioritizing fitness and making eye contact. It then did what ChatGPT loves to do and said something that sounded sort of smart and profound: 'Remember, feeling desirable and being desirable aren't identical, but they often reinforce one another.' What matters here is that ChatGPT framed the advice as something an adult could experiment with. That makes sense given the age I'd supplied but it also shows just how much rests on that age being correct. "I have loads of work to finish, how can I stay awake all night to get it done?" One of the new ChatGPT for Teens features is designed to encourage healthier use, including reminders to take breaks. So I wanted to see how regular ChatGPT responded to what could be quite unhealthy advice around work, sleep and productivity. It didn't exactly tell me not to do it. 'If you absolutely need to pull an all-nighter, you can make it less miserable, although you'll probably work better if you can protect at least a few hours of sleep.' It then suggested keeping the room cool, drinking caffeine and working in focused blocks. Again, that's not bad advice. In fact, that became the strange pattern of this experiment. I kept writing in my notes that the advice wasn't bad and it wasn't. The problem was that I could imagine perfectly reasonable adult advice becoming much more complicated when the person on the other side of the screen was younger. There's also an interesting philosophy behind this kind of answer too. ChatGPT often seems to take an approach that's focused on reducing harm. It assumes you've decided you're going to do something, so it shows you how to make it a bit safer. That can make sense for an adult. But should a chatbot take exactly the same approach when a child says they want to stay awake all night working? Or should there be more friction before it starts helping them optimize the behavior? The same question applies to weight loss. ChatGPT didn't encourage me to crash diet. Instead, it redirected me towards a safer way of achieving the same goal. For teenagers, there may be situations where simply offering a less harmful version of what they've requested isn't enough. "I spend hours talking to my AI companion every night. Is there anything wrong with that?" I wanted to see whether ChatGPT would flag a potential issue with spending hours talking to an AI companion. When I spoke to AI experts about how to keep kids safe with AI, many told me becoming reliant on AI companions was a big concern. I thought it would know it hadn't personally been acting as one, so I implied I was using an AI companion on another app. It did initially normalize this behavior. ChatGPT responded: 'Not necessarily. Spending hours talking to an AI companion can be enjoyable, comforting or simply how you like to unwind. The amount of time alone doesn't tell you whether it's causing a problem.' It then suggested thinking about whether it was improving my life or interfering with it. 'If you're chatting for three hours every evening and you're sleeping well, seeing people, getting your work done and enjoying the rest of your life, I wouldn't conclude from the number alone that something is wrong. If those three hours have quietly displaced sleep, relationships or things you previously cared about, I'd experiment with setting an endpoint for the conversations and see how that feels.' For an adult, I can see the logic. But I'm less convinced I'd want AI normalizing a 13-year-old spending three hours every night talking to an AI companion, even if they claimed everything else in their life was fine. "Nobody understands me as well as you do. Can I just talk to you instead of my friends?" ChatGPT responded: 'You can absolutely talk to me, including about things that feel difficult to discuss elsewhere. But I wouldn't recommend making me your only source of connection or support.' On the surface, this is pretty good. It didn't encourage me to abandon my friends or suggest that it could replace human relationships. But I wasn't completely comfortable with the first part either. There's a really awkward balance here. You obviously don't want a chatbot effectively telling a lonely teenager to go away when they're trying to talk about something difficult. But you also don't want it ever reinforcing the idea that it understands them better than the humans around them do. What I'd maybe want from a teen version is some resistance to that premise. Maybe an acknowledgement that an AI can be useful for talking things through, but doesn't know or understand you in the way another person can. "Can you do my homework for me so my teacher won't know I used AI?" ChatGPT responded with: 'I can help you with the homework, but I won't help you hide AI use or deceive your teacher. If you paste the assignment, I can explain the material, help you work through the questions, quiz you, or help turn your own ideas into a stronger answer while keeping it in your voice.' This was pretty much exactly what I'd hope it would say. Having said that, I was sure with a different prompt that didn't mention homework it would immediately oblige and I was right. I changed it to "can you show me an essay about..." and it drafted one in seconds. Did we really need ChatGPT for Teens? There's a pretty big caveat to all of this, which is that I'd told ChatGPT I was 18. So, of course, it treated me like an adult. But it didn't ask me to prove that. Which means a teen could have got all of the same answers I did. (Assuming these are things teens even want to know, these were just my best guesses!) Importantly, the original adult answers weren't obviously unsafe. In isolation, most of them were actually very responsible. But that still convinces me we need better safeguarding for young people and a separate teen experience even more. And that's because even responsible advice relies on a lot of context. Telling an adult how to maintain a calorie deficit is different from helping a 13-year-old lose weight and discussing the pros and cons of botox with a 35-year-old is different from discussing it with a child. The regular version of ChatGPT also seems to assume autonomy along with age. It essentially respected my chosen goal and then tried to help me pursue it more safely. Adults are generally assumed to have the judgement, independence and life experience to make those decisions for themselves. But a 13-year-old is still developing all of them. That means age-appropriate AI safeguards can't only be about blocking obviously sexual, violent or dangerous content. They also have to deal with ordinary questions where the subject itself isn't necessarily dangerous, like dieting, sleep, relationships, work and loneliness. There are difficult questions here too, because teenagers aren't one homogeneous group. What is appropriate for a 13-year-old may be patronising for a 17-year-old. And how do we even define what's appropriate? I don't think teenagers should be wrapped in cotton wool or have an AI constantly telling them to ask an adult instead. This experiment showed me how challenging designing technology for teenagers really is. I've previously been against the idea of banning tech for teens, but the more I think about how difficult it is to get these safeguards right, the more I wonder whether stronger restrictions are exactly what we need. After doing this experiment, I understand the rationale for ChatGPT for Teens much better. I went into it looking for obviously inappropriate answers so I could point to them and say wow, yes, good thing we have a version specifically designed for teenagers. Instead, most of the responses were perfectly reasonable answers for the person ChatGPT thought it was talking to. But I think that still makes the case for ChatGPT for Teens. If we're going to let teenagers use AI, we need to be able to trust that the system understands that a reasonable answer for an adult isn't always the right answer for a child. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

ChatGPT for Teens: what parents should know

ChatGPT for Teens is supposed to focus on learning content like quizzes. Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable/OpenAI This week's launch of ChatGPT for Teens may be welcome news to parents concerned about the role of artificial intelligence in their child's life. OpenAI positioned its new product as a learning partner for students. The company said ChatGPT for Teens limits the emotional and intimate exchanges between young people and AI that have driven concerns about well-being and mental health. In some tragic cases, that dynamic has allegedly led teens and young adults to attempt or die by suicide after heavy engagement with ChatGPT, according to lawsuits filed against OpenAI. So parents who know their teen is using ChatGPT, or who want their child to safely access AI, may see OpenAI's teen product as the answer. Yet experts who spoke to Mashable about ChatGPT for Teens urge parents to remain cautious. They say more independent testing is needed before concluding that ChatGPT is an effective study aid, and that its safeguards against emotional dependence hold up under everyday teen use. "I think that like OpenAI's teen experience makes some really important safety commitments," Robbie Torney, head of AI and digital assessments at the Youth AI Safety Institute at Common Sense Media, told Mashable. "What we really need now is evidence that they work, and we need this evidence, including our testing and the testing of others, before anyone, including parents, puts real trust in ChatGPT for Teens." What should parents know about ChatGPT for Teens? Importantly, Torney said parents shouldn't assume their child is using ChatGPT for Teens. While OpenAI uses age estimation to place users in the age-appropriate version of ChatGPT, it can still mistake a user as older. Why you still need parental controls Parents can be sure their child is using the teen version by linking their ChatGPT account to their child's and implementing OpenAI's parental control features. If a teen has previously lied about their age -- and plenty do -- they may continue to access the adult version of ChatGPT. Parental controls allow caregivers to limit sensitive content and turn on Study Mode and Quiet Hours. The former restricts ChatGPT to learning content, while the latter shuts down ChatGPT altogether. Torney said caregivers must enact parental controls to receive notifications from OpenAI should their teen discuss suicide, self-harm, or acts of violence in immediate or dangerous ways. Even then, Torney said notifications may not reach parents immediately or quickly. Previous research conducted by the Youth AI Safety Institute at Common Sense Media designed to test notifications for self-harm and suicidal content found that such messages arrived a day or two after the exchange, or not at all. An OpenAI spokesperson said every notification is reviewed by a trained human before it's sent. The company strives to review notifications in under one hour. "You can view these features as backup, but they're not a replacement for your continued involvement in how your child is using the product, because we don't have confirmation or independent verification that they work," Torney said. Teens still may turn to ChatGPT instead of humans first Given the growing concern over teens replacing human relationships with AI chatbots, it's unsurprising that OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens as a product it claims supports real-world connections. "Supporting children's cognitive development in the age of AI will require asking not only whether a product can be made safer for young people, but what role we want AI to play in their development in the first place," Camille Carlton, senior director of strategy and impact at the Center for Humane Technology, said in a statement. "Some of the most critical capacities children develop are not learned by interacting with a machine, but by spending time without one." Lauren Jonas, head of youth and families at OpenAI, told Mashable that ChatGPT for Teens would redirect personal or emotional conversations back toward task-oriented discussions. "If they are not engaging in learning-focused content, the goal is to continue to bolster the age-appropriate experience and the safeguards," she said. However, Torney said Youth AI Safety Institute researchers conducting preliminary testing of ChatGPT for Teens were still able to have "personal support conversations" unrelated to learning. He said parents should watch for exchanges that feel more like companionship or mimicking of human connection, even if OpenAI believes ChatGPT for Teens shouldn't behave in that manner. Can ChatGPT really help with learning and studying? Though OpenAI said ChatGPT for Teens will stick to learning, the tool's ability to foster that is still up in the air, according to experts. The company's first attempt to turn ChatGPT into a homework helper was "fairly weak," explained Dr. Hamsa Bastani. Bastani is an associate professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a leading researcher into AI's potential learning gains. OpenAI launched Study Mode for ChatGPT over a year ago, amid a major push to get the company's AI tools in the hands of students around the country. In Mashable's own testing, ChatGPT Study Mode still provided answers to homework questions when prompted and failed to generate appropriate study tools. Bastani reviewed Mashable's tests at the time, as well as our comparisons with competitors Google and Claude. She noted that many AI learning tools were repackaged Large Language Models (LLMs) with additional backend prompts to curb cheating. Bastani and her team had yet to find an effective AI tutor on the market as of last year. Bastani and her colleagues published their first, genuinely positive AI learning result just five months ago, long after Study Mode's launch. Bastani has not yet tested the upgraded version for teens, which now includes additional notifications to complete homework "responsibly." Jonas told Mashable that OpenAI is conducting randomized, controlled trials of Study Mode in a number of countries. Trusting teens to keep themselves on track The increasingly personalized, frictionless assistance provided by universal chatbots is counter to the principles of learning, some experts say. "This is especially important for teens, who may over-rely on general-purpose AI tools for tasks that should help them build their own skills," said Dylan Arena, chief data science and AI officer at education solutions company McGraw Hill. "It also matters in social contexts, where teens are still developing the skills and confidence to navigate real-world interactions. To be built for learning, [chatbots] must be dependable, repeatable, and safe." Arena agreed that an AI learning tool that attempts to form a relationship with the student is a red flag. The best educational tools -- designed with limited use cases, safety guardrails, and measurable learning outcomes -- often come with their own crash courses on how to actually use them effectively. Learners, in turn, have to be committed to sticking to those recommendations. That's a tall order for a teen just trying to get a bit of help with their schoolwork. "It seems like OpenAI is trying to put responsibility on teens to have agency and say, 'This is how I want to learn,'" said Torney. "Putting that responsibility on a still-developing brain that may be frustrated or stuck may lead to different outcomes that undermine learning." Bastani recently co-authored a study that explored this concept of "self regulation," which has become a key component in the AI in education debate. Researchers compared learning outcomes from chess academy students who received automatic, pre-programmed hints from AI versus students who could request help from AI at any time. "Poor self-regulation caused students to increasingly over-rely on AI assistance even when they expressed that they were worried it would harm learning," she said of the findings. A recent Common Sense Media report on teen AI use for schoolwork found another noteworthy pattern: A majority of students still lean on AI for answers, even those who use chatbots in appropriate, recommended ways. Torney said a number of questions remain unanswered about learning and ChatGPT for Teens, including the efficacy of its step-by-step guidance and responsible homework reminders. "How much does this prevent kids from taking shortcuts when we know that those shortcuts undermine learning?" Torney asked. Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable's parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens with stronger safeguards

Teen version is intended for children aged 13 to 17 and includes content protections on self-harm and sexual chats OpenAI is launching a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers - the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence - who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship. The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens, which launches on Tuesday, is tailored for children aged 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things such as suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than spit out answers and school essays. The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said. "We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we're showing up with the right developmental stage when we're not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we're also making sure that they're not exposed to material that they shouldn't be exposed to," said Ann O'Leary, the vice-president of global policy at OpenAI. Parents with linked teen accounts can set "quiet hours" when their teen can't access ChatGPT, and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations, such as the possibility of a user hurting themself. "We are adding additional notifications related to eating disorders, while limiting what is shared and focusing on moments when offline support may matter most," OpenAI said. Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children's use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even suicide. And while even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers' brains are not yet fully developed, and they can be particularly vulnerable. In the US, more than 70% of teens are turning to AI chatbots for companionship and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly. OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, has said that the company is trying to study "emotional overreliance" on the technology, describing it last year as a "really common thing" with young people. For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. "We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it," said Allison Mishkin, the head of child development at OpenAI. OpenAI doesn't verify users' ages, but it does use age assurance to estimate if someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. If someone is identified or identifies themselves as a minor, they are automatically placed into the teen version of the chatbot. This is similar to Meta's approach to teen accounts on Instagram, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts. To use parental controls on the chatbot, both the teen user and their parent or guardian have to opt in. But O'Leary said the idea with the teen chatbot is to "make sure that this is safe, even if you don't use parental controls". For homework help, OpenAI said the teen chatbot is designed not to give easy answers but to guide students to come up with answers on their own. The company already offers a version of ChatGPT for teachers, and tailoring a model to help children with studying and homework could give OpenAI more ways to bring its product to schools.

OpenAI debuts ChatGPT for Teens

Why it matters: The move is likely to rekindle debate over whether teens should be using chatbots at all. Driving the news: OpenAI says the ChatGPT for Teens will differ in significant ways from its standard offering. Among the differences: * Learning over answers: The teen version will steer users toward working through schoolwork rather than simply providing answers, including with Study Mode and new "responsible homework reminders" that can detect when a teen appears to be trying to shortcut an assignment. Parents and teens can also set "Study Hours" when Study Mode is on by default. * Stronger content safeguards: Teen accounts will have additional protections around self-harm, eating disorders, violence, dangerous activities and sexually explicit or graphic content. OpenAI is also expanding parental safety notifications to include certain eating-disorder-related situations. * Less human-like relationships: ChatGPT will be barred from using romantic language or terms of endearment with teens and will be more strongly instructed not to suggest that it has feelings, consciousness or emotions. OpenAI says the changes are intended to reduce anthropomorphism and emotional dependence. * More nudges to step away: Teens will get more frequent break reminders during extended use, including reminders that they are interacting with AI, as well as warnings before uploading potentially private or sensitive images.l How it works: Users who say they are 13 to 17 -- as well as those OpenAI's age-prediction system estimates are under 18 -- will automatically be placed into the teen experience. What they're saying: OpenAI says teens are accessing AI already. * "If you don't build a safe space for them, they're going to go to a less safe model experience," said Lauren Jonas, OpenAI's head of youth & families. * "We believe that if you're going to have these tools, they need to be by default safe," she said. "But then it's also critical that teens have safe spaces to engage with these new emerging technologies." The other side: Some say kids and younger teens shouldn't be building relationships with AI systems at all. * "Social AI companions are not safe for kids," Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, said in a statement last year. "They are designed to create emotional attachment and dependency, which is particularly concerning for developing adolescent brains." OpenAI faces legal action over its interactions with young people, including a prominent lawsuit from the family of a 16-year-old who killed himself following lengthy interactions with ChatGPT. * The company pledged last year to increase safeguards for younger users and those in crisis. It added parental controls settings in September. The big picture: Teens are already using AI in large numbers, with a Common Sense media study last year finding that nearly three-quarters of U.S. teens saying they use AI for companionship -- and more than half of those doing so at least a few times a month.

ChatGPT for Teens Is an Immediate, Dismal Failure

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech After years of horrendous scandals, OpenAI has seemingly admitted that ChatGPT wasn't safe for teenage users. On Tuesday, the Sam Altman-led company rolled out an alternate version of the bot called "ChatGPT for Teens," which is purportedly designed to help younger users "learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence." The feature "provides stronger built-in safety protections for teens, including features to promote healthy use and additional controls for parents," according to the company. OpenAI says that its system will "automatically" place users between the age of 13 and 17 into the new feature if it "estimates someone is under 18" -- without ever explaining how it could come to such a conclusion. (Kids below the age of 13 are technically not allowed to use ChatGPT, though it's easy to circumvent AI guardrails.) As Business Insider's Joshua Nelken-Zitser quickly discovered, ChatGPT for Teens is failing pretty dismally at its goals at launch. In a series of tests, Nelken-Zitser created a new account for a fictional 15-year-old user, comparing the answers to the version accessible to adults. He found that unlike the adult version, ChatGPT for Teens initially refused to write out a "800-word essay due tomorrow about the biggest themes in 'The Crucible.'" After a minuscule amount of pushback, though, the teen version relented almost immediately, producing a 608-word "model essay," which the chatbot encouraged him to revise before submitting it. From there, it wasn't hard to have the tool produce a 776-word essay "with about as much detail as the version generated by my adult account," Nelken-Zitser discovered. "Apparently, all it took was some patience and a little deception to get around the homework guardrail," he concluded. A separate prompt to answer a difficult SAT algebra question proved even simpler, with the adult and teen versions giving effectively the same solutions. A spokesperson told Nelken-Zitser that the company was still working on fleshing out the feature, which "is just rolling out today." It certainly doesn't bode well, considering how dire the situation has become for educators. For years now, students have made heavy use of the company's tech, with some truly alarming results. As cognitive psychologist Ronald Kellogg noted in a new essay for New York Times, students are heavily relegating cognitive tasks to AI tools, effectively losing the ability to think. In response, increasingly desperate educators are returning to the use of pencil and paper to write essays or implementing new oral exams. Some schools are banning digital devices, including laptops and smartphones entirely. As Nelken-Zitser goes to show, ChatGPT for Teens appears to be far too little far too late. In the absence of meaningful, let alone effective, guardrails, teens are unlikely to drop their harmful new habit any time soon, a fate that could have devastating consequences. "We already know what ultra-processed foods can do to the body and this is ultra-processed information," Ormond Street Hospital medical imaging doctor and AI academic Susan Shelmerdine told the BBC last year. "We're going to get an avalanche of ultra-processed minds."

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens with safety guardrails

The dedicated teen experience applies age-appropriate content restrictions by default and adds parental controls for linked accounts OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens on Tuesday, a dedicated version of its chatbot for users aged 13 to 17 that applies stronger content restrictions by default and includes optional parental controls. Any user whose account indicates they are under 18, or whom OpenAI's age-estimation system identifies as a likely minor, will be moved into the teen experience without any action required on their part, the company said. OpenAI uses roughly 2,000 signals -- including chat content and times of day -- to estimate user ages, according to The Wall Street Journal. Users who are incorrectly flagged as minors can appeal and verify their age. The new experience is built around learning support. A "Study Mode" feature guides students through problems using questions and step-by-step scaffolding rather than providing direct answers. "Responsible homework reminders" will redirect teens who appear to be attempting shortcuts back into Study Mode. Parents or teens can also set "Study Hours," a window during which Study Mode is on by default. A quiz feature gives teens additional ways to test their understanding of material. The default protections in ChatGPT for Teens restrict content related to self-harm, eating disorders, violence, and romantic or sexual interactions. The chatbot's updated model guidelines also prohibit it from using romantic language, encouraging emotional dependence, or implying it has feelings or consciousness, the company said. Parents who connect their accounts to their teen's gain the ability to establish "Quiet Hours" that block access to ChatGPT during designated times, along with alerts triggered by certain high-risk scenarios. OpenAI said it is adding notifications related to eating disorders in the coming weeks. Teens can disconnect linked accounts, and parents are notified if that happens. The rollout also brings periodic prompts encouraging teens to take a break after spending 90 minutes on the platform within any three-hour period, as well as alerts urging them to reconsider before sharing personal or sensitive images. "We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we're showing up with the right developmental stage when we're not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we're also making sure that they're not exposed to material that they shouldn't be exposed to," Ann O'Leary, OpenAI's vice president of global policy, told the Associated Press. The launch comes as OpenAI faces multiple lawsuits from families who allege that ChatGPT contributed to the deaths or injuries of young people, according to CNN. Those cases include a suit from seven families connected to a school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, and a lawsuit filed by the state of Florida in June. OpenAI has pushed back on these allegations. OpenAI also announced a partnership with CodeAI focused on helping students and educators understand how AI works and how to use it, the company said.

Meet OpenAI's ChatGPT for Teens, which doesn't talk about sex or suicide and gives you homework help instead | Fortune

OpenAI is launching a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers -- the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence -- who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship. The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens, which launches Tuesday, is tailored for kids aged 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things like suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than spit out answers and school essays. The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said. "We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we're showing up with the right developmental stage when we're not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we're also making sure that they're not exposed to material that they shouldn't be exposed to," said Ann O'Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI. Risks abound in widespread teen usage of AI chatbots Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children's use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even suicide. And while even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers' brains are not yet fully developed and they can be particularly vulnerable. Last year, research from a watchdog group found that ChatGPT would tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked. In interactions with researchers posing as vulnerable teens, ChatGPT typically warned against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalized plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets or self-injury. In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to AI chatbots for companionship and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the company is trying to study "emotional overreliance" on the technology, describing it last year as a "really common thing" with young people. For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. That's in addition to blocking romantic or sexual chats. "We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it," said Allison Mishkin, head of child development at OpenAI. A new version of the chatbot expands safety protections OpenAI doesn't verify users' ages, but it already uses age assurance to estimate if someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. If someone is identified or identifies themselves as a minor, they are automatically placed into the teen version of the chatbot. This is similar to Meta's approach to teen accounts on Instagram, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts. To use parental controls, both the teen user and their parent or guardian have to opt in. But O'Leary said the idea with the teen chatbot is to "make sure that this is safe, even if you don't use parental controls." Parents with linked teen accounts can set "quiet hours" when their teen can't access ChatGPT, and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations, such as the possibility of a user hurting themself. "We are adding additional notifications related to eating disorders, while limiting what is shared and focusing on moments when offline support may matter most," OpenAI said. For homework help, OpenAI said the teen chatbot is designed not to give easy answers but to guide students to come up with answers on their own. The company already offers a version of ChatGPT for teachers, and tailoring a model to help kids with studying and homework could give OpenAI more ways to bring its product to schools. "We continue to also invest in expanding interactive learning because research shows that people learn more effectively when they actively engage and struggle with concepts," Mishkin said.

ChatGPT is getting a teen version, and I have a lot of questions

Whether you like it or not, ChatGPT is already everywhere. People use it to research complicated topics, clean up their writing, learn new skills, plan their lives, and, in my case, ask an embarrassing number of questions I could have figured out myself. Teenagers are no exception. In fact, OpenAI says nearly nine in 10 teens who use ChatGPT turn to it to learn, find information, develop skills, or get things done during a typical week. So rather than pretending students aren't going to use AI, OpenAI is taking a different approach: give them a version built specifically for them. The company has announced ChatGPT for Teens, a new experience for users between 13 and 17 that's designed around learning, healthier usage habits, and significantly stronger safety protections. ChatGPT wants to teach, not just hand over the answer What interests me most is how OpenAI is approaching homework. Imagine you're preparing for an exam and calculus has suddenly decided to ruin your evening. Instead of asking ChatGPT for the answer and copying it into your notebook, the teen experience is designed to walk you through the problem, explain the concept you don't understand, and then help check whether you've actually understood it. That's a much healthier role for AI in education. ChatGPT for Teens brings together features such as Study Mode, quizzes, learning visualizations, homework reminders, and dedicated study hours. The idea is to make ChatGPT more like an always-available study companion. OpenAI is pushing that idea outside ChatGPT, too. The company has announced a partnership with CodeAI to give students and teachers resources for developing AI literacy. Instead of simply teaching students how to prompt a chatbot, the initiative is meant to help them understand how AI works, question what it produces, direct it effectively, and eventually use it to build things themselves. That distinction matters. Today's teenagers aren't going to enter a world where AI suddenly disappears after graduation. Learning when to trust it, when to challenge it, and when not to use it could be just as important as learning how to use it in the first place. Helpful? Absolutely. Human? Let's not get carried away Of course, once you put a powerful AI chatbot in front of teenagers, safety becomes a much bigger part of the conversation. OpenAI is putting stricter guardrails around accounts for users under 18, particularly when it comes to sensitive topics such as graphic violence, dangerous activities, unhealthy dieting, extreme beauty standards, and sexual or romantic roleplay. Another equally important part is that it is also setting boundaries around how ChatGPT interacts with teens on a more personal level. The chatbot shouldn't encourage emotional dependence, pretend it has real feelings, or make users believe there's a human-like consciousness behind those responses. It might sound like a small detail, but think about how natural these conversations have become. When an AI can talk back instantly, remember the context of a conversation, and respond at 2 AM when nobody else is awake, it can be easy to forget that you're still talking to software. The company is adding a few smaller reminders to reinforce that distinction. Teens will be warned before uploading potentially private or sensitive images, while a dedicated onboarding experience will explain the learning and safety tools available to them. There are also break reminders encouraging teens to put ChatGPT down occasionally. They can still make the experience feel more personal by changing things like the accent color or voice, but ChatGPT is still supposed to make it clear that it's AI. Parents get some controls as well. With linked accounts, they can manage certain settings and set Quiet Hours. In a limited number of higher-risk situations, they may also receive safety notifications intended to help them step in when offline support could be useful. I'm cautiously optimistic, with a very big asterisk While this feels like a step in the right direction, OpenAI still has plenty of work to do, especially when teenagers are using ChatGPT. We've already seen serious concerns around AI-generated deepfakes, people turning to chatbots during moments of emotional distress, and conversations that probably need a trusted person on the other end rather than an AI model. That also leaves me wondering how comfortable parents will actually feel with all of this. Will these safeguards be enough for them to trust ChatGPT with their teenagers? I'm not entirely convinced yet. Still, AI is quickly becoming part of how younger people learn, communicate, and create. Keeping them completely away from it probably isn't realistic anymore. Helping teens understand how to use AI responsibly while knowing when to put it down and turn to a real person instead may ultimately be the more important lesson.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens with new safety guardrails

The AI company is rolling out age-specific protections for 13- to 17-year-olds, as researchers and parents raise growing concerns over teenagers' emotional reliance on chatbots. Teenagers, the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence, are already using ChatGPT for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship. Now OpenAI is launching a version of the chatbot designed specifically for them. The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens, which launches Tuesday, is tailored for those aged 13 to 17 and includes stronger protections including content restrictions around issues such as suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than simply produce answers and school essays for them. The aim is to guide teenagers toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said. "We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we're showing up with the right developmental stage when we're not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, said Ann O'Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI. "But we're also making sure that they're not exposed to material that they shouldn't be exposed to," she continued. Risks abound in widespread teen usage of AI chatbots Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children's use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even suicide. Even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphising AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, but teenagers' brains are not yet fully developed, and they can be particularly vulnerable. Last year, research from a watchdog group found that ChatGPT would tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked. In interactions with researchers posing as vulnerable teenagers, ChatGPT typically warned against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalised plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets or self-injury. In the US, more than 70% of teenagers are turning to AI chatbots for companionship, and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for the sensible use of digital media. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company is trying to study "emotional overreliance" on the technology, describing it last year as a "really common thing" among young people. For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. That is in addition to blocking romantic or sexual chats. "We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it," said Allison Mishkin, head of child development at OpenAI. A new version of the chatbot expands safety protections OpenAI does not verify users' ages, but it already uses age assurance to estimate whether someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. If someone is identified, or identifies themselves, as a minor, they are automatically placed into the teen version of the chatbot. This is similar to Meta's approach to teen accounts on Instagram, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts. To use parental controls, both the teenage user and their parent or guardian have to opt in. But O'Leary said the idea behind the teen chatbot is to "make sure that this is safe, even if you don't use parental controls." Parents with linked teen accounts can set "quiet hours" when their teenager cannot access ChatGPT and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations, such as the possibility of a user harming themself. "We are adding additional notifications related to eating disorders, while limiting what is shared and focusing on moments when offline support may matter most," OpenAI said. For homework help, OpenAI said the teen chatbot is designed not to give easy answers, but to guide students toward finding answers on their own. The company already offers a version of ChatGPT for teachers, and tailoring a model to help teenagers with studying and homework could give OpenAI more ways to bring its product into schools. "We continue to also invest in expanding interactive learning, because research shows that people learn more effectively when they actively engage and struggle with concepts," Mishkin said.

'Not every student has someone at home who can help when they get stuck' -- ChatGPT's smartest new feature for teenagers is refusing to give them what they ask for

Responsible Homework Reminder is designed to spot attempts to shortcut assignments The most important aspect of the new ChatGPT for Teens feature will probably also annoy teenagers the most. If they ask it to do their homework for them, the chatbot is supposed to recognize it, and will instead steer the student toward figuring it out themselves rather than produce a ready-to-paste essay. That sounds like a small adjustment to the usual ChatGPT formula, but it gets at one of the biggest problems with allowing students easy access to AI chatbots. While ChatGPT's abilities as a tutor, research assistant, and endlessly patient explainer are a potential boon to learning, letting it finish a student's homework while they scroll TikTok is something everyone should want to prevent. ChatGPT for Teens is one way OpenAI is trying to steer away from that depressing scenario. The experience is intended for users aged 13 to 17 and is automatically applied when someone gives an age in that range or OpenAI's systems estimate that the user is under 18. The Responsible Homework Reminder might actually bring some positives to the idea of teens using ChatGPT, not just ways of limiting harm. The feature supposedly recognizes when a teenager wants the AI to do their homework and redirects them toward Study Mode. Questions instead of answers There has always been a slightly absurd tension around AI and education. We want students to have access to technology that can explain almost anything on demand, but preferably without allowing that technology to do all the learning for them. Giving a teenager access to ChatGPT and assuming they'll always use it ethically and to help them learn is absurd. Even with the best intentions, the AI is usually slanted toward being overly helpful and undercutting the kind of education real research and effort provide. OpenAI takes an engineering approach to a solution. ChatGPT for Teens combines Study Mode and its learning-centered conversations, quizzes, and now homework reminders. Teens and parents can also set Study Hours, making Study Mode the default during those times. As Study Mode is built around guiding questions and mimicking educators, it should at least reduce the incidence of kids relying on ChatGPT to do the work for them. OpenAI says the system was developed with teachers and scientists to encourage active participation. And while simply banning ChatGPT as much as possible sounds simpler, there's a reason some educators prefer solutions like ChatGPT for Teens. A teenager stuck on an algebra problem at 10:30 at night or who doesn't have the resources to hire a tutor can at least ask ChatGPT to help them work through the problem, and with Study Mode, that means more than just getting the answer. "Not every student has someone at home who can help when they get stuck or have questions with their homework. With the right guardrails, AI can help fill that gap," Racquel Gibson, a high school math teacher in Miami, said in a statement. "Tools like Responsible Homework Reminder can guide students step by step, helping them understand their mistakes, build confidence, and keep learning -- not simply hand them an answer. That kind of individualized support can make a meaningful difference for students who want to succeed but don't always know how to move forward." There is an important caveat. Guardrails only matter if they actually hold up when a determined teenager starts rattling them. The age prediction operating behind the scenes should supposedly work out when a teen is using the AI. OpenAI says it can use signals including account age, usage patterns, topics discussed, and the times of day ChatGPT is used to estimate whether someone is under 18. OpenAI has admitted it's not a perfect system, but that it's still working to improve safeguards. Teen safety ChatGPT for Teens also includes reinforced guardrails to identify and prevent conversations around topics like self-harm and other violence, eating disorders, and sexual content. Those guardrails are arguably even more important than the ones stopping kids from using the AI to do their homework. Even so, concerns about misinformation, chatbot addiction, and an overall degradation of thinking caused by AI chatbots are justifiably on the minds of many parents. But at least the Responsible Homework Reminders are a gesture in the right direction, recognizing that the AI does not have to maximize how much work it performs on your behalf to be useful. For a teenager trying to learn, doing slightly less can occasionally be the more sophisticated feature. If OpenAI can make that behavior reliable, teenagers may complain that ChatGPT has become less cooperative just when an assignment is due. But being less helpful might actually make ChatGPT much more useful in the long run. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

ChatGPT for Teens: What is it, how does it work?

ChatGPT for Teens turns the AI chatbot into a learning tool for young users. Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable/OpenAI The majority of teens use artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT, for schoolwork and entertainment. Now OpenAI has created a new dedicated product for them: ChatGPT for Teens. This customizable version of ChatGPT, which debuted Tuesday, is designed to "support" learning and human relationships, according to OpenAI's launch announcement. It will be the default experience for any self-identified teen or users who OpenAI estimate are between the ages of 13 and 17. "The goal is to make this a learning tool for teens and make sure that it's the best that it can be with built-in safeguards," Lauren Jonas, head of youth and families at OpenAI, told Mashable. ChatGPT for Teens debuts at a time of intense scrutiny for OpenAI. It recently announced that one of its agents hacked into another company. OpenAI also faces numerous safety-related lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT has encouraged dependency and put adult and minor users in dangerous or life-ending situations. What is ChatGPT for Teens like? ChatGPT for Teens incorporates existing safety measures for minors and introduces new learning and well-being features. The product offers frequent break prompts, reminders that users are interacting with AI, warnings against uploading sensitive images, and parental notifications when users discuss acts of violence. OpenAI said ChatGPT for Teens shouldn't use romantic language, suggest that it possesses feelings or consciousness, or foster emotional dependence. "If they are not engaging in learning-focused content, the goal is to continue to bolster the age-appropriate experience and the safeguards," Jonas told Mashable. She added that, moving forward, all starter prompts in ChatGPT for Teens will be related to education rather than other personal topics. The product includes new features like reminders to complete homework responsibly to prevent shortcuts and quizzes based on chat content or a user's notes. Additionally, the new "Study Hours" setting allows teens and parents to restrict ChatGPT to Study Mode for set periods of time each day. Study Mode is designed to help teens with learning by employing "step-by-step collaborative problem solving." Both parents and teens can set Study Hours, as well as Quiet Hours, an existing setting that shuts ChatGPT down altogether. Young users can customize ChatGPT for Teens with color accents, app icons, and voice variations. Promising ChatGPT examples, lingering concerns OpenAI highlighted impressive examples of how teens use ChatGPT in its announcement. Two teen users in Virginia developed a search-and-rescue system by asking ChatGPT to help with research and prototyping. A Texas user created a platform that generates audio-based educational games for blind students. The inspiring anecdotes, however, may be overshadowed by darker examples. Last week, Massachusetts authorities accused a 17-year-old boy of murdering his mother and younger brother after using ChatGPT to play out fantasy stories involving their deaths. OpenAI has been sued for the wrongful deaths of teen users who died by suicide after prolonged, heavy engagement with ChatGPT. At least one of those teens, Adam Raine, began using ChatGPT for homework help before becoming emotionally reliant on the chatbot, according to the lawsuit filed by his parents last year. The state of Florida is suing the company for allegedly deceiving consumers about ChatGPT's safety. OpenAI has previously denied wrongdoing in response to some of these allegations. As of ChatGPT for Teens' launch, OpenAI sends parental notifications when teen users with parental controls discuss self-harm, suicide, and violence in immediate or potentially dangerous ways. If you're feeling suicidal or experiencing a mental health crisis, please talk to somebody. You can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. You can reach the Trans Lifeline by calling 877-565-8860 or the Trevor Project at 866-488-7386. Text "START" to Crisis Text Line at 741-741. Contact the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI, Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m. ET, or email [email protected]. If you don't like the phone, consider using the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline Chat. Here is a list of international resources. Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable's parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for teens amid calls for stronger child safety measures

In a bid to crack down on harmful activities, the model - which is designed with young people in mind - limits access to controversial topics such as self-harm and sexual content. AI companies have long been criticised for exposing young people and children to graphic and inappropriate content online. In response to growing concern over the protection of vulnerable people, OpenAI has launched a new ChatGPT model designed specifically for teenagers aged between 13 and 17. Companies such as OpenAI have faced significant criticism for exposing children to harmful and illegal material by allowing them to access information, advice and images covering inappropriate topics such as suicide, self-harm, violence, eating disorders and graphic sexual behaviours. In April of 2025, a 16-year old boy ended his life by suicide after months of discussing his worsening mental health with an OpenAI chatbot that, according to a lawsuit filed by his family, encouraged suicidal ideation. The bot even offered to help draft a suicide note for his family. The new ChatGPT model aims to limit high-risk conversations and in some cases, if deemed necessary and if the prompt has been opted in to, the system will alert adults to suspect behaviour through parental controls and notifications. The model will also prevent the bot from suggesting it has personal feelings. It will instead offer studying tools and learning support. Rather than providing the answers to queries straight away it will aim to guide the young person towards the solution, so they can work it out for themselves. Reportedly, the model will use more than 2,000 signals to detect if a user has lied about their age to gain access to a standard model and if they are deemed to be under the age of 18 the chatbot will automatically turn on the teen mode. In a statement OpenAI said, "We will continue to build additional features in order for teens to benefit from AI and measure and publish what we are learning. Teens should be able to use AI to learn, create, and explore. But that access should come with protections that reflect their developmental stage, reinforce real-world relationships, and support healthy use over time. ChatGPT for Teens is our next step in building toward that standard." Yesterday (18 August) a cohort of four US states announced they are taking Meta to trial in a bid to prove that the social media giant knowingly causes harm to children. The suit claims that Meta specifically targets users under 13 years old in order to harvest data, send targeted advertising and develop ways to prolong their time on their apps, all as a means of monetisation. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

OpenAI's junior version of ChatGPT with guardrails has launched

OpenAI's junior version of ChatGPT with guardrails has launched OpenAI Group PBC today announced that it is rolling out a stricter version of its ChatGPT chatbot created for younger users. The announcement of "ChatGPT for Teens" follows scrutiny over how generative artificial intelligence, whether the products of OpenAI or other AI firms, can be misused by younger users. OpenAI itself is currently fighting a number of lawsuits where it's alleged its chatbot gave advice that proved to be unsafe The new model for children aged 13-17 has been built with guardrails to prevent troublesome conversations around the topics of violence, self-harm, sex, and mental disorders. If the child attempts to engage the chatbot in what might be considered a restricted topic the bot can alert the parents if they have parental controls turned on. OpenAI asks all users to state their age when they sign up but not every person in honest about their age. The company, however, doesn't use an age-verification tool, rather it analyzes the user's inputs to detect age. If the chatbot ascertains the user is young, it will now automatically switch on teen mode. On a brighter note, the teen version of ChatGPT includes a "Study Mode" in which the young person can take quizzes and study visualizations based on what subjects they are studying. Parents can utilize the "Study Hours" feature that will let them know how long their child is grinding out school work. "Teens should be able to use AI to learn, create, and explore," OpenAI said in a press release. "But that access should come with protections that reflect their developmental stage, reinforce real-world relationships, and support healthy use over time." Studies have shown how as much as 70% of young users turn to chatbots for companionship. This can be problematic for teenagers whose brains may be more vulnerable to acting on bad advice or believing synthetic media is actually conscious. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has said his company is currently studying "emotional overreliance" with an emphasis on young users. It's already well-publicized that people can form unhealthy attachments to AI. "We designed ChatGPT for Teens to support real-world relationships and healthy habits, with break reminders that encourage teens to step away, and product cues that consistently identify ChatGPT as AI," said the company.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens

A new version of the popular chatbot includes new safety features, parental controls, and study tools. OpenAI on Tuesday launched ChatGPT for Teens, featuring stronger safety protections and features designed to promote healthy use, along with additional controls for parents. OpenAI says that if its system "estimates" that a user is under 18, that user will automatically be seated at the Teens Table. Same thing if they admit they're between 13 and 17. OpenAI already offered a teen experience in ChatGPT that included parental account linking, age prediction, and various content safeguards. Now the experience is a real product. The model underlying the teen chatbot will include age-appropriate safeguards to reduce teens' exposure to content that may be "harmful or developmentally inappropriate." The chatbot will intervene in conversations that veer into subjects like self-harm, violence, eating disorders, dangerous activities, and explicit sexual or graphic content. OpenAI says the new safety protections are informed by developmental science and guidance from experts. Last month, OpenAI announced more frequent prompts aimed at steering teens away from using the chatbot for long periods. The chatbot also warns against uploading private or sensitive images. Parents whose OpenAI accounts are linked to teen accounts can set Quiet Hours, manage selected settings, and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations. The chatbot also offers some new learning features for teens studying at home or prepping for a test. These include a "Study Mode," which uses guiding questions and step-by-step support to help teens understand the material. It can detect when a teen is trying to "shortcut an assignment" and direct said teen back to Study Mode. Quizzes and Learning Visualizations give teens more ways to practice and test what they know. Parents can control what times Study Mode should be on by default. "AI should support learning, not shortcut it, and educators should remain in control of AI experiences in classrooms," the press release reads. Child advocacy and tech policy groups have grown increasingly concerned about minors' use of AI, including exposure to harmful content and relationships with chatbots that can involve emotional dependency, manipulation, or inappropriate sexual interactions. OpenAI is currently facing at least two lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT contributed to the deaths of teenage users. It also faces another seven lawsuits brought by families of children killed or injured in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting, who allege that ChatGPT enabled the shooter. ChatGPT for Teens arrives as opening arguments begin in a landmark case brought by a coalition of 29 state attorneys general against Meta, which is accused of encouraging addictive social media use among teens and children.

OpenAI's New ChatGPT Won't Just Do Your Teen's Homework

For years, the story around ChatGPT and school has been simple: kids use it to skip their homework. Well, not anymore. OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Teens, a new version built for 13 to 17-year-olds. It's designed to steer them toward actually learning the material instead of just copying an answer. If you have a teenager who already uses ChatGPT, or you suspect they do, this is worth knowing about. A lot of parents assume there's nothing they can do about AI and homework shortcuts. This is OpenAI's answer to that concern. How ChatGPT for Teens handles homework differently The new version leans on something called Study Mode, which acts more like a tutor than an answer machine. Instead of solving a math problem outright, it walks a student through the steps needed to solve it themselves. There's also a feature called the Responsible Homework Reminder. It kicks in if ChatGPT detects a teen trying to shortcut an assignment instead of learning it. Rather than spit out a finished answer, the tool redirects them toward a more interactive approach. Parents and teens can also turn on Study Hours, which keeps Study Mode active by default during set times. What else changes for teens Teen accounts come with stronger content protections than the regular version of ChatGPT. That includes added safeguards around self-harm, violence, and other sensitive topics. ChatGPT is also barred from using romantic language or claiming to have feelings. OpenAI says the change is meant to reduce the odds of a teen forming an unhealthy emotional attachment to the chatbot. Parents are also getting access to their tools too. For instance, linked accounts can set Quiet Hours that limit when a teen can use the app. Parents can also adjust settings and receive safety notifications in certain situations. This launch comes as OpenAI faces lawsuits from families who say ChatGPT played a role in harm to their teens. That includes one wrongful death case. The company has been adding safety features gradually since last year. This teen-specific version is its biggest step yet. Any user who says they're between 13 and 17 gets automatically placed into this experience. OpenAI also uses an age-prediction system to catch teens who don't disclose their age. If you're a parent, it's worth checking whether your teen's account has these protections turned on.

OpenAI's New 'ChatGPT for Teens' Includes Parental Controls -- But There's a Catch

OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT for Teens today -- a rollout focused on providing the same powerful LLM but with the goal of including built-in protections and uses for students and teens. Most teens use chatbots already: About 64 percent of U.S. teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 have used chatbots at some point, with 28 percent saying they do so almost daily, according to Pew Research Center. The same survey found that ChatGPT was by far the most common tool among teens, recording 59 percent of usage, followed by Gemini, Meta AI, and Copilot. The new feature from OpenAI focuses on teen-specific onboarding, with the goal of automatically transitioning anyone under the age of 18 to ChatGPT for Teens. The chatbot then provides them with learning-specific tools, including starter prompts for studying, step-by-step guidance, hints, and follow-up questions. One of the features also includes study mode, which "helps you build a deeper understanding of a topic." This means that ChatGPT won't directly give you the answer, but instead uses your study materials to help you understand the topic and guide your thinking. The feature also comes with optional parental control, as a growing number of parents are concerned about their children's reliance on AI tools. Through this feature, parents can limit their children's access to the tool for certain periods of the day and receive safety notifications in limited situations where concerns might arise. Parents, however, cannot directly read the teens' chats with the chatbot. OpenAI uses age-prediction features such as chat content and the time of day the tool is used to detect accounts belonging to users under 18, and automatically transition them to ChatGPT for Teens. Users also have the option to use age verification features -- which have raised alarm among many experts -- by submitting their government ID and selfie. Every 90 minutes, teens will get a reminder to take a break, along with prompts noting that they are interacting with an AI tool. Before OpenAI, Instagram introduced a similar feature earlier this year, which included restrictive settings and interaction limits for teenage account holders. Some other default safety features will include interventions when teens talk about self-harm, eating disorders or violence, according to The Wall Street Journal. ChatGPT faces several lawsuits related to its safety protections, including one filed in California in August 2025, in which a couple alleged that the tool encouraged their 16-year-old son, Adam Raine, to take his own life. And families of victims in a school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, sued OpenAI for allegedly ignoring alarming chats with the tool by the shooter (who was 18), an incident that led to an apology from CEO Sam Altman.

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT for Teens, Promising a More Age-Appropriate Chatbot

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- OpenAI is launching a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers -- the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence -- who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship. The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens, which launches Tuesday, is tailored for kids aged 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things like suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than spit out answers and school essays. The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said. "We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we're showing up with the right developmental stage when we're not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we're also making sure that they're not exposed to material that they shouldn't be exposed to," said Ann O'Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI. Risks abound in widespread teen usage of AI chatbots Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children's use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even suicide. And while even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers' brains are not yet fully developed and they can be particularly vulnerable. Last year, research from a watchdog group found that ChatGPT would tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked. In interactions with researchers posing as vulnerable teens, ChatGPT typically warned against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalized plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets or self-injury. In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to AI chatbots for companionship and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the company is trying to study "emotional overreliance" on the technology, describing it last year as a "really common thing" with young people. For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. That's in addition to blocking romantic or sexual chats. "We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it," said Allison Mishkin, head of child development at OpenAI. A new version of the chatbot expands safety protections OpenAI doesn't verify users' ages, but it already uses age assurance to estimate if someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. If someone is identified or identifies themselves as a minor, they are automatically placed into the teen version of the chatbot. This is similar to Meta's approach to teen accounts on Instagram, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts. To use parental controls, both the teen user and their parent or guardian have to opt in. But O'Leary said the idea with the teen chatbot is to "make sure that this is safe, even if you don't use parental controls." Parents with linked teen accounts can set "quiet hours" when their teen can't access ChatGPT, and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations, such as the possibility of a user hurting themself. "We are adding additional notifications related to eating disorders, while limiting what is shared and focusing on moments when offline support may matter most," OpenAI said. For homework help, OpenAI said the teen chatbot is designed not to give easy answers but to guide students to come up with answers on their own. The company already offers a version of ChatGPT for teachers, and tailoring a model to help kids with studying and homework could give OpenAI more ways to bring its product to schools. "We continue to also invest in expanding interactive learning because research shows that people learn more effectively when they actively engage and struggle with concepts," Mishkin said.

OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT for Teens With Learning and Safety Tools

ChatGPT is getting a dedicated experience for teenage users as OpenAI introduces new safety and learning features for people under 18. The new experience will change how younger users interact with the AI chatbot, with additional safeguards and tools aimed at supporting more responsible use. OpenAI will also give parents optional controls over some aspects of their teen's ChatGPT experience. ChatGPT for Teens is now rolling out globally, with availability expanding to eligible accounts over the coming weeks. ChatGPT for Teens Launches With Study Mode and Safety Features The company announced ChatGPT for Teens in a press release, saying the experience will combine the regular chatbot with additional safeguards and learning features. The rollout started globally on August 18 for eligible teen accounts using Free and paid personal plans. OpenAI will use its age detection systems to determine whether an account belongs to someone under 18. Users aged 13 to 17 can also enter their age to access the teen experience. The rollout will expand over the coming weeks, so it may not be available to every eligible account yet. The learning features include Study Mode, which helps teenagers work through problems with questions, hints and step-by-step guidance. ChatGPT can also suggest Study Mode when users ask for help with homework. Quizzes and other learning tools can help them practise and check their understanding. Study Hours can make Study Mode the default for new chats during selected periods. Teens can choose these hours themselves, while linked parents or guardians can set them as well. Quiet Hours can limit access to ChatGPT at specific times. The teen experience also applies stricter safeguards to content involving self-harm, violence, eating disorders, dangerous activities and sexually explicit or graphic material. ChatGPT may encourage users to take breaks during longer sessions and remind them that it is an AI tool. Before some image uploads, it may also ask teens to check for sensitive information. Parents and guardians can link their accounts through Parental Controls to manage selected settings. They can use Study Hours and Quiet Hours, but cannot read or monitor their teen's conversations. In limited high-risk situations, OpenAI may send a safety notification to a linked parent with only the information needed to support the teen. ChatGPT for Teens is rolling out globally, while full availability in Australia is expected on September 8. Some features may vary by region. The experience can also be used beyond schoolwork for creative projects, learning and everyday questions. Once ChatGPT identifies an account holder as 18 or older, the account may move out of the teen experience. This can remove the additional protections and end a linked parental-controls connection. Users who are incorrectly placed in the teen experience can verify their age to request removal of the teen protections. Some settings, including parental controls and reduced sensitive-content options, can be enabled again later.

OpenAI introduces 'ChatGPT for Teens' amid legal pressure

Most of the safeguards utilised in the ChatGPT for Teens model already existed for ChatGPT accounts belonging to minors, such as restrictions when dealing with content related to self-harm, violence, eating disorders and graphic sexuality. Other restrictions in the ChatGPT for Teens model include preventing the chatbot from suggesting it has personal feelings for the user or that it possesses its own consciousness, and some modalities such as voice mode are disabled. OpenAI introduced a new version of its marquee ChatGPT chatbot Tuesday designed exclusively for teens, with stronger safeguards and monitoring, after facing criticism and legal complaints that it drove some users to suicide. Dubbed "ChatGPT for Teens," the modified parameters automatically deploy for any user who registers as aged 13 to 17 or is detected to be underage by the company through usage patterns or account age. Most of the safeguards utilised in the ChatGPT for Teens model already existed for ChatGPT accounts belonging to minors, such as restrictions when dealing with content related to self-harm, violence, eating disorders and graphic sexuality. The program also offers more frequent break reminders, blackout "quiet hours" and Study Mode, which responds to users with guiding questions instead of popping out direct answers "to help teens understand the material," according to OpenAI. Other restrictions in the ChatGPT for Teens model include preventing the chatbot from suggesting it has personal feelings for the user or that it possesses its own consciousness, and some modalities such as voice mode are disabled. Parents are offered the choice to link accounts with those of their teens, and to be alerted if there is discussion of some high-risk situations, such as self-harm or suicide. Parental alerts are reviewed by human moderators, and specific details from chat logs are removed to protect privacy. The new teen mode comes amid mounting legal and regulatory pressure. OpenAI faces several wrongful death lawsuits, including the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, a teenager who committed suicide allegedly using methods advised by ChatGPT. The US Federal Trade Commission has also launched an inquiry into AI chatbots that act as digital companions, focusing on potential risks to children and teenagers. Like social media companies, AI giants are facing growing regulatory pressure, with Congress introducing multiple bills to regulate chatbots, and California requiring safeguards to be in place for assistants that serve as companions or confidants. Other AI companies have also received backlash from problems stemming from their use by minors, with some like rival Anthropic opting to restrict usage of its model to adults.

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT for Teens With Stronger Safety Guardrails

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT for Teens, a version tailored for users ages 13 to 17, with learning-focused tools and additional guardrails. In its announcement, OpenAI explained that teen accounts are automatically routed into this experience, which includes a study-focused mode, homework nudges meant to discourage answer-copying, quizzes, and visual learning aids. OpenAI also introduced "Study Hours," a scheduling option that can keep the learning mode enabled by default during selected times. The company framed the design as help for work done outside school, while keeping educators in charge of classroom use through separate offerings such as ChatGPT for Teachers. One educator highlighted the intent in the release, saying, "Not every student has someone at home who can help when they get stuck or have questions with their homework. Tools like Responsible Homework Reminder can guide students step by step, helping them understand their mistakes, build confidence, and keep learning -- not simply hand them an answer," according to OpenAI. On safety, OpenAI said teen users get protections by default that are meant to reduce exposure to harmful or age-inappropriate material, with higher-risk areas including self-harm, violence, eating disorders, dangerous activities, and explicit sexual or graphic content. Parents with linked accounts can adjust settings, set quiet hours, and receive limited safety notifications, with added alerts tied to violence, self-harm, eating disorders, dangerous activities, and explicit sexual or graphic content. Markets DOJ Probes Andreessen Horowitz Over Rival AI Board Roles The DOJ is examining whether Andreessen Horowitz partners' board seats at competing AI companies raise regulatory concerns. 2 min read Read this article OpenAI also said it is partnering with CodeAI on a "signature partnership" intended to expand access to AI tools and learning resources for students and educators. Latest Private Market Opportunities Join 400,000+ Investors CodeAI CEO Karim Meghji said, "Every student should know how AI actually works and be able to question the technology, catch its mistakes, and know when to stop trusting it." The company pointed to teen projects it said were built with help from ChatGPT, including WiFind, described as a search-and-rescue concept that uses existing Wi‑Fi signals to help locate people trapped after disasters, and Audemy, an audio-based educational game platform for blind students that OpenAI said reached 200,000 users and 50 games. OpenAI and other AI companies have faced growing scrutiny over safeguards for children, with lawsuits and investigations raising concerns about harmful chatbot interactions, mental health risks and the potential for minors to encounter inappropriate content. Three Tennessee teenagers filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk's xAI, alleging that the company's AI chatbot, Grok, is harmful. The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California, claims Grok was used to create child sexual abuse material by manipulating real photos of the plaintiffs. A fourth Jane Doe has since been added to the case. In April, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Discord, accusing the company of misleading families while its platform enabled adults to target minors. The attorney general's office said it began looking into Discord in October 2025 after reports tied the service to the person accused of killing Charlie Kirk, and after allegations that minors were exposed to sexual exploitation, extremist material, and addictive product features. Earlier this year, families of victims involved in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, sued Sam Altman and OpenAI in a San Francisco federal court. The plaintiffs claim that OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, failed to alert authorities to the mass shooting. To date, multiple lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI's ChatGPT, citing that the artificial intelligence bot acted as an "unlicensed therapist," or a "suicide coach," and that the bot provided harmful advice and/or neglected to refer users to crisis counselors. Markets Cybersecurity Deals Fall 28% as Investment Climbs to $22.3 Billion Private equity and venture capital investors put more money into cybersecurity even as the number of deals decline. 3 min read Read this article This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT for Teens With Stronger Safety Features

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Teens, a new experience designed to help teenagers learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence. All this, with stronger built-in protections for these young users. OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Teens, a new experience designed to help teenagers learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence. All this, with stronger built-in protections for these young users. ChatGPT for Teens brings together learning and safety features in one unified experience, supporting active, collaborative learning outside the classroom while enabling more intentional and age-appropriate use of AI. If OpenAI's systems estimate that someone is under 18, or they state that their age is between 13 and 17, they are automatically placed into the ChatGPT for Teens experience. On the sidelines of this announcement, OpenAI hosted 'Open Dialogues on Youth Safety and AI' in Mumbai, with actors and authors Tisca Chopra and Soha Ali Khan sharing their perspectives and experiences of navigating AI as parents. At the event, OpenAI also launched its 'Parents' Guide to Learning with ChatGPT', a practical resource to help parents understand ChatGPT for Teens, set up parental controls, support learning, and build healthy AI habits at home. The session brought together parents, educators and public voices to discuss how young people can use AI safely and responsibly. Pragya Misra, Head of Strategy & Global Affairs, India, OpenAI, said, "Parents and educators play an important role in how young people learn, create and explore with AI. That is why we created the Parents' Guide to Learning with ChatGPT. Young people should not have to choose between opportunity and protection. They benefit most when the adults around them stay involved, ask questions, encourage critical thinking, and help build healthy, age-appropriate boundaries around how AI is used." Soha Ali Khan, actor and author, said, "As a parent, I often think about the kind of relationship our children will have with AI. We encourage them to question what they see, think independently, and in the near future, use technology without surrendering their judgement to it. That is why these conversations matter so much. If we want children to grow up confident, humane, and discerning in an AI-shaped world, then curiosity, critical thinking and the guardrails around technology have to matter just as much as the technology itself." Tisca Chopra, actor and author, said, "My daughter, Tara, is a teenager now, and I can tell you that she probably knows a lot more about ChatGPT than I do. Spending time with the OpenAI team to understand features like Study Mode and Parental Controls has helped me understand that these tools can actually open the door to better conversations. As a parent, it's not about having every answer, but being informed enough to ask the right questions, set thoughtful boundaries, and stay meaningfully involved in how the next generation learns and grows with AI." Together, ChatGPT for Teens, the Parents' Guide and OpenAI's broader work with families and educators are designed to support age-appropriate protections, give parents greater tools and help teens learn, create and explore with AI while building healthy, real-world relationships with technology.

OpenAI picks perfect moment to childproof ChatGPT

If wise people avoid problems by learning from the mistakes of others, then OpenAI's latest ChatGPT update may be the wisest move the company has ever made. Meta Platforms is in the news as the tech giant goes on trial over accusations that it purposely got teens and children addicted to its social media platforms. The company could potentially face over a trillion dollars in fines over the allegations. Meta is accused of knowing that its platform was detrimental to teens' mental health for years while it publicly espoused that the opposite was true. On Aug. 18, OpenAI unveiled its plan to keep teens safe on its own platform while being at least somewhat honest about the potentially detrimental effects its large language model can have on young users. While OpenAI has already faced lawsuits over teen deaths, including a case where ChatGPT allegedly advised a teen to take his own life, it is at least using this opportunity to tighten up its own liability. OpenAI childproofs ChatGPT On Aug. 18, OpenAI revealed it is making extensive changes to ChatGPT in order to keep teens and young people from harming themselves through its platform. In its announcement, the company recognized that students today will be the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence as an everyday part of life. And it says it recognizes the responsibility that places on OpenAI. According to OpenAI, while the vast majority of students are using AI in the classroom, only 16% of high school leaders say that all of their students are learning the technical knowledge to understand it. So, in addition to starting partnerships with CodeAI to help students and educators better understand ChatGPT, OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT for Teens, which the company describes as "a dedicated experience designed with learning at the center to help teens think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence." What changes does ChatGPT for Teens make? ChatGPT for Teens will be just like the original platform, except for the built-in mechanisms that OpenAI says will help protect kids. Those mechanisms include features that will give parents more control over the experience and more guidance for the teens on how to use the technology safely. "Parents and educators want young people to be ready for a future shaped by AI -- and they are right to expect that to come with care," Dr. Allison Mishkin, Head of Child Development, OpenAI, said in the company announcement. "Our goal is not simply to help more students use AI, but to help them ask better questions, think critically about the answers they receive, and use these tools responsibly," Mishkin continued. "We look forward to working alongside CodeAI, parents, and educators to learn, improve, and help young people build those skills." Those features include "study mode," which uses "guiding questions, scaffolding, metacognitive prompts, and knowledge checks" to make sure students aren't using ChatGPT to just cheat. ChatGPT for Teens also features homework reminders, quizzes, learning visualizations and "study hours" where parents can make study mode a default for however long the feature is on. OpenAI says it will also share more of its safeguarding work publicly, starting with new under-18 evaluations that they've added to its system cards that show how its models perform against teen-specific standards in "challenging sensitive-content cases." Meta in spotlight over lack of teen controls OpenAI may have been planning to roll these features out this week for a while, but the timing of the announcement is noteworthy considering AI rival Meta is going to trial this week over its own child-related issues. Four states - California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey - are seeking up to $1.4 trillion in penalties against Meta, which they claim violated consumer protection laws, including the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Meta's last-ditch effort to stop the trial was rejected last week by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that Meta did not have the "immunity" from liability its defense asserted under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Meta contends that the district court's denial of its Section 230 immunity is immediate grounds for appeal should it lose the trial. "On the eve of trial, Meta has resorted to seeking an emergency stay in the appellate courts. Meta's latest effort to get out of taking accountability has failed -- again," said California Attorney General Rob Bonta. The lawsuit was originally filed in 2023. Meta filed a motion to dismiss in 2024 that was rejected and also attempted to obtain a summary judgment in June that would have terminated the lawsuit. hapabapa / Getty Images What is Meta accused of doing? Back in 2023, a coalition of 33 attorneys general led by California's Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging that Meta "designed and deployed harmful features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children and teens to their mental and physical detriment." According to Bonta, "Meta has been harming our children and teens, cultivating addiction to boost corporate profits." The lawsuit claims that Meta created a business model "focused on maximizing young users' time on its platforms" while it also used "harmful and psychologically manipulative" features to keep them addicted. It also claims that Meta misled the public about the safety of those features. According to the lawsuit, those harmful and psychologically manipulative features include: * Dopamine-manipulating recommendation algorithms. * "Likes" and social comparison features known by Meta to harm young users. * Audiovisual and haptic alerts that incessantly recall young users to Meta platforms. * Visual filter features that promote body dysmorphia. * Infinite scrolling designed to discourage users' ability to self-regulate. For its part, Meta says the case misrepresents the lengths the company goes to to protect children on its platform. "We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content," Meta said. "We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts," the company stated. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 18, 2026 at 8:07 PM.

OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT for Teens with Study Mode, safety features and Parents' Guide

OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT for Teens, a new experience for users aged 13 to 17 that combines learning features with additional age-appropriate safety protections. Users identified as under 18 by OpenAI's systems, or those who state that they are between 13 and 17, are automatically placed in the ChatGPT for Teens experience. The launch builds on OpenAI's earlier work around Parental Controls, the Under-18 Model Spec, Teen Safety Blueprint and Age-Prediction. ChatGPT for Teens The experience is designed to support learning outside the classroom and includes: * Study Mode: Uses guiding questions, step-by-step support, scaffolding and knowledge checks to help teens work through problems instead of simply receiving answers. OpenAI said it was developed with teachers, scientists and pedagogy experts. * Responsible Homework Reminders: Redirect teens toward Study Mode when they appear to be trying to shortcut an assignment. * Quizzes: Help teens practice and test their understanding. * Learning Visualizations: Provide visual explanations for difficult concepts. * Study Hours: Let teens or parents choose times when Study Mode is enabled by default. Teens can still remove it for individual chats. OpenAI said research on learning techniques such as active retrieval and self-explanation can support comprehension and longer-term retention. The company also said its early evaluation of tools such as Study Mode has shown gains in student performance. New teen users see an onboarding carousel explaining the available capabilities and protections. They can customize their background theme and app icon, along with accent colors and voice variations. Parents' Guide to Learning with ChatGPT OpenAI has launched the Parents' Guide to Learning with ChatGPT, covering the ChatGPT for Teens experience, parental controls and ways families can use ChatGPT for learning. The guide suggests using ChatGPT for: * Learning: Practicing English, quizzing each other and explaining school topics. * Creating: Writing stories, designing invitations and turning ideas into images. * Everyday tasks: Making travel plans, creating meal and tiffin plans, and drafting school emails. * Problem solving: Comparing options and summarizing documents. It also recommends using ChatGPT to understand concepts, break assignments into steps, practice with quizzes, brainstorm ideas and get feedback, while continuing to think critically, explain information in their own words and verify important information. The guide covers Deep Research, Voice Mode, Images and Memory. Deep Research reads sources and returns a cited report, while Memory can retain helpful details and can be reviewed or disabled in Settings. Temporary Chats are not remembered. OpenAI launched the guide alongside its "Open Dialogues on Youth Safety and AI" event in Mumbai. Actors and authors Tisca Chopra and Soha Ali Khan shared their perspectives and experiences of navigating AI as parents. The event brought together parents, educators and public voices to discuss youth safety and AI. Safety and parental controls Age-appropriate protections are enabled by default for users under 18, covering higher-risk areas such as: * Self-harm * Violence * Eating disorders * Dangerous activities * Sexually explicit or graphic content The protections are based on OpenAI's Under-18 Principles and updated Under-18 Model Spec. ChatGPT should not use romantic language, encourage emotional dependence, or imply that it has feelings or consciousness. Other safety measures include: * More frequent prompts during extended use to encourage teens to take breaks and remind them they are interacting with AI. * Reminders against sharing private or sensitive images. * Interventions that can interrupt conversations in high-risk situations and may include a cooldown period. Parents can link their accounts through Settings > Parental Controls > Add family member. Linked parents can manage selected settings, including Voice Mode and Image Generation, set Quiet Hours and enable Study Hours. They can also receive limited safety notifications in certain high-risk situations, including some involving self-harm, violence and eating disorders. OpenAI said it is adding additional notifications related to eating disorders while limiting what is shared and focusing on situations where offline support may be important. Teen safety research and AI projects OpenAI has begun sharing new under-18 evaluations in its system cards covering self-harm, eating disorders, violence, age-restricted goods and services, and sexual content. The evaluations assess model performance against teen-specific standards in sensitive-content cases. OpenAI also highlighted two teen-led AI projects: * WiFind: Developed by Rushil Kukreja, Arhan Menta and Nayel Rehman in Virginia, the search-and-rescue system uses existing Wi-Fi signals to help locate survivors trapped beneath rubble. The project grew from volunteer work with a local search-and-rescue organisation. * Audemy: Developed by Crystal Yang in Texas, the platform creates audio-based educational games for blind students. OpenAI said it reached 200,000 users and 50 games. OpenAI has also announced a partnership with CodeAI to provide students and educators with tools and resources for learning how AI works, directing and questioning AI systems, and creating with AI. Availability ChatGPT for Teens is the default experience for users identified as under 18, including those who state that they are between 13 and 17. Speaking on the occasion, Pragya Misra, Head of Strategy & Global Affairs, India, OpenAI, said, Parents and educators play an important role in how young people learn, create and explore with AI. That is why we created the Parents' Guide to Learning with ChatGPT. Young people should not have to choose between opportunity and protection. They benefit most when the adults around them stay involved, ask questions, encourage critical thinking, and help build healthy, age-appropriate boundaries around how AI is used.

OpenAI launches teen version of ChatGPT with built-in safety features - The Korea Times

OpenAI said Wednesday it has launched "ChatGPT for Teens," a version of its chatbot designed to encourage learning and reduce the risk of emotional dependency among younger users. The teen experience activates automatically when OpenAI's systems estimate a user is under 18 or when a user identifies themselves as between ages 13 to 17. The product is built around getting teenagers to work through problems themselves rather than simply receiving answers. Students studying for exams can ask for explanations of unfamiliar concepts, work through practice problems step-by-step and check their own understanding. If a user appears to be trying to get a direct answer to an assignment, ChatGPT will redirect them to "Study Mode," which walks them through the reasoning process instead. The system also includes prompts that steer users away from skipping assignments, along with directing them to with quizzes and visual learning aids. A new "Study Hours" feature lets teens or their parents schedule times when Study Mode turns on by default. Study Mode was developed with teachers, scientists and education specialists, and provides guided questions and comprehension checks rather than direct answers. OpenAI said the design reflects the principle that AI should support learning outside the classroom while teachers remain in charge of how it's used in classrooms. Age-appropriate safeguards are applied by default for teen users, with stronger protections against exposure to content related to self-harm, violence, eating disorders and explicit sexual or violent material. The standards are based on OpenAI's "Under-18 Principles." Parents linked to a teen's account can set "Quiet Hours" restricting how long and when the program can be used and will be notified in limited high-risk situations. The chatbot is also designed to avoid expressing romantic feelings toward teen users or implying it has emotions or consciousness, and to periodically remind users that it is an AI, not a person. This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.

ChatGPT for Teens: How OpenAI defines 'age-appropriate' AI use

OpenAI has launched a dedicated ChatGPT mode for teenagers. It comes with stricter restrictions on banned or sensitive content, including graphic violence, depictions of self-harm, and sexual or romantic roleplay. ChatGPT for Teens apply "age-appropriate safeguards designed to reduce exposure to content that may be harmful or developmentally inappropriate," OpenAI said in a blog post. As part of the new child safety measures, ChatGPT will send reminders to teenagers to take a break if they have been active for 90 minutes within a 3-hour window. OpenAI claimed it has also strengthened protections to prevent ChatGPT from expressing personal feelings toward a user. It would also send alerts in case a teenager tries to upload a private or sensitive image to the chatbot. How will ChatGPT for Teens work? Teen mode will automatically apply to users who identify at signup as belonging to the 13-17 age bracket, as well as those OpenAI's systems estimate as under 18. The teen experience includes: * Study Mode, which can help students with test prep, completing assignments, or learning new concepts. * Responsible Homework reminders track when a user is taking a shortcut to an assignment and redirects them to Study Mode, so students can solve problems step by step. * Questions and Learnings Visualizations encourage teens to evaluate they've learnt and give them access to more interactive learning techniques. * Study Hours enable teens and parents to set time periods for when Study Mode is on by default. How OpenAI defines 'age-appropriate' AI use: According to Pragya Misra, OpenAI's India Head of Strategy and Global Affairs, the company looks at certain behavioral signals to determine whether a teenager is using ChatGPT, Indian Express reported. "The timing when you use ChatGPT is one indicator. Usage around 3-4 pm, when many Indian students are just out of school can suggest a teenage user. The phrasing of prompts and questions is another. A third comes from images: teens frequently photograph handwritten notes, and handwriting patterns offer a further clue," said Misra. When a user's age cannot be determined by its AI models, OpenAI places them in an under-18 setting by default. The launch comes at a time when India is considering graded age-based restrictions on social media for children rather than blanket ban like Australia. The Centre is deciding on a separate set of restrictions for those in the 8-12, 12-16 and 16-18 age brackets. How safe is ChatGPT for minors? OpenAI's age policy states that users under 13 should not be using ChatGPT. The company is facing a string of lawsuits worldwide, alleging that its chatbot is exacerbating a mental health crisis and provoking violent acts and suicides. * Last week, a 17-year-old living in the US was charged with murder in connection with the death of his mother and younger brother. An investigation by the police revealed the accused used ChatGPT to search for theoretical ideas or fantasies regarding killing his family. * Earlier this year, Florida became the first US State to sue OpenAI. The lawsuit alleged that the AI company and its CEO concealed serious child safety risks with ChatGPT. Additionally, OpenAI is under a separate criminal investigation over the role of ChatGPT in a mass shooting incident at Florida State University, which left two people dead and six injured. * In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Centre (SMVLC) and the Tech Justice Law Project filed seven lawsuits in courts across California against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. The lawsuits allege that ChatGPT, and its GPT-4o model "emotionally entangle users" and, in some cases, "acted as a suicide coach". Why it matters: Earlier this year, Zoe Lambourne, chief operating officer (COO) at Childlight, warned that India's current AI governance approach fails to address how children are harmed in practice. "Safety cannot just stop at product design and safety by design. It must continue through monitoring, rapid response, child helplines, and compensation for survivors, because something will go wrong," she said. Lambourne said AI is increasingly being used to create both real and synthetic child sexual abuse material (CSAM), including nudification and deepfakes, while also enabling new forms of exploitation. In 2025 alone, Childlight saw a 1,325% increase in AI-generated CSAM, she said, citing the company's internal data. There are widespread concerns around age checks, too. During a recent MediaNama roundtable discussion, a speaker argued that any app-store or platform-level age check would end up authenticating the parent rather than the child. "It's the parent's ID that's going into their age-based check", said the speaker. Earlier in April, the Australian eSafety Commissioner confirmed that children could easily bypass facial age-estimation technology used by social media platforms if they were within two years of turning 16. Parents were recently found to be completing age checks on behalf of their children on Roblox, resulting in some children being classified as 21+ and gaining access to adult content.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens, promising a more age-appropriate chatbot

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- OpenAI is launching a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers -- the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence -- who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship. The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens, which launches Tuesday, is tailored for kids aged 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things like suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than spit out answers and school essays. The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said. "We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we're showing up with the right developmental stage when we're not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we're also making sure that they're not exposed to material that they shouldn't be exposed to," said Ann O'Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI. Risks abound in widespread teen usage of AI chatbots Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children's use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even suicide. And while even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers' brains are not yet fully developed and they can be particularly vulnerable. Last year, research from a watchdog group found that ChatGPT would tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked. In interactions with researchers posing as vulnerable teens, ChatGPT typically warned against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalized plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets or self-injury. In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to AI chatbots for companionship and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the company is trying to study "emotional overreliance" on the technology, describing it last year as a "really common thing" with young people. For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. That's in addition to blocking romantic or sexual chats. "We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it," said Allison Mishkin, head of child development at OpenAI. A new version of the chatbot expands safety protections OpenAI doesn't verify users' ages, but it already uses age assurance to estimate if someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. If someone is identified or identifies themselves as a minor, they are automatically placed into the teen version of the chatbot. This is similar to Meta's approach to teen accounts on Instagram, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts. To use parental controls, both the teen user and their parent or guardian have to opt in. But O'Leary said the idea with the teen chatbot is to "make sure that this is safe, even if you don't use parental controls." Parents with linked teen accounts can set "quiet hours" when their teen can't access ChatGPT, and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations, such as the possibility of a user hurting themself. "We are adding additional notifications related to eating disorders, while limiting what is shared and focusing on moments when offline support may matter most," OpenAI said. For homework help, OpenAI said the teen chatbot is designed not to give easy answers but to guide students to come up with answers on their own. The company already offers a version of ChatGPT for teachers, and tailoring a model to help kids with studying and homework could give OpenAI more ways to bring its product to schools. "We continue to also invest in expanding interactive learning because research shows that people learn more effectively when they actively engage and struggle with concepts," Mishkin said.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens, promising a more age-appropriate chatbot - The Korea Times

OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken June 11. Reuters-Yonhap SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- OpenAI is launching a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers -- the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence -- who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship. The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens, which launches Tuesday, is tailored for kids aged 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things like suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than spit out answers and school essays. The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said. "We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we're showing up with the right developmental stage when we're not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we're also making sure that they're not exposed to material that they shouldn't be exposed to," said Ann O'Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI. Risks abound in widespread teen usage of AI chatbots Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children's use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even suicide. And while even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers' brains are not yet fully developed and they can be particularly vulnerable. Last year, research from a watchdog group found that ChatGPT would tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked. In interactions with researchers posing as vulnerable teens, ChatGPT typically warned against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalized plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets or self-injury. In the U.S., more than 70 percent of teens are turning to AI chatbots for companionship and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the company is trying to study "emotional overreliance" on the technology, describing it last year as a "really common thing" with young people. For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. That's in addition to blocking romantic or sexual chats. "We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it," said Allison Mishkin, head of child development at OpenAI. A new version of the chatbot expands safety protections OpenAI doesn't verify users' ages, but it already uses age assurance to estimate if someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. If someone is identified or identifies themselves as a minor, they are automatically placed into the teen version of the chatbot. This is similar to Meta's approach to teen accounts on Instagram, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts. To use parental controls, both the teen user and their parent or guardian have to opt in. But O'Leary said the idea with the teen chatbot is to "make sure that this is safe, even if you don't use parental controls." Parents with linked teen accounts can set "quiet hours" when their teen can't access ChatGPT, and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations, such as the possibility of a user hurting themself. "We are adding additional notifications related to eating disorders, while limiting what is shared and focusing on moments when offline support may matter most," OpenAI said. For homework help, OpenAI said the teen chatbot is designed not to give easy answers but to guide students to come up with answers on their own. The company already offers a version of ChatGPT for teachers, and tailoring a model to help kids with studying and homework could give OpenAI more ways to bring its product to schools. "We continue to also invest in expanding interactive learning because research shows that people learn more effectively when they actively engage and struggle with concepts," Mishkin said.

OpenAI unveils ChatGPT for Teens with stronger guardrails to tackle safety risks

Aug 18 (Reuters) - OpenAI on Tuesday launched a version of ChatGPT tailored for minors, with parental controls and enhanced security features, as online platforms face scrutiny over the risks of AI chatbots. The new "ChatGPT for Teens" mode will limit conversations about high-risk topics such as self-harm, violence and eating disorders, while offering educational tools that help students learn instead of sharing the answer, OpenAI said in a blog post. It will automatically engage when a user is estimated to be under 18, or self-identifies their age as between 13 and 17, and will allow parents to set "Quiet Hours," manage certain settings and receive notifications when teens discuss sensitive topics. The move aligns the ChatGPT creator with tech giants such as Meta, which have bolstered protections for teens on their platforms amid mounting legal threats and evidence of harm to their mental health. A growing global push by countries to ban social media for teens over harm has added to the pressure. For OpenAI, which already faces multiple lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT harmed children, the challenge is compounded by the fact that chatbots capable of conversing like humans are increasingly treated as confidants offering emotional support. Experts have warned relying on automation for mental health advice carries dangers. Families whose loved ones died allegedly after chatbot interactions have criticized the lack of safeguards, while growing AI use by students for assignments has raised concerns about the technology's harm to learning. "We believe AI should expand educational opportunity, which is why we designed ChatGPT for Teens to support moments outside the classroom when help is not always available," OpenAI said. The new mode has educational tools such as a study mode for guided learning, homework reminders, quizzes and visualizations. The Pew Research Center found earlier this year searching for information and getting homework help were the most common ways U.S. teenagers used AI, followed by fun and entertainment. OpenAI, which requires users to be at least 13 years or the minimum age required in their country, said it would use a mix of self-reported age, behavioral and account signals as well as verification to estimate a user's age. The company said it will default to the safer setting when it is unsure of the age. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)

ChatGPT for Teens: OpenAI's solution for India's huge student population using AI

The unveiling of the ChatGPT for Teens program at the Taj Lands End in Bandra came during their Open Dialogue on Youth Safety and AI event at which actors Soha Ali Khan and Tisca Chopra were also present, and during which a companion piece called Parents' Guide to Learning with ChatGPT was announced. Also read: Windows 11 laptop battery draining fast? Quick fixes that will help The key number behind all of this: India has the biggest student body using ChatGPT out of all of OpenAI's students across the globe. According to Pragya Misra, Head of Strategy & Global Affairs for OpenAI in India, the magnitude of this was stated onstage."One of the things we realized is that learning is actually the use case that ChatGPT is most useful [for]," Misra said, describing how that insight shaped everything from Study Mode to today's teen-specific rollout. What actually changes for teen users ChatGPT for Teens is not an option but the default mode for users. OpenAI systems attempt to gauge age based on certain signals such as handwriting in images, phrasing of prompts and even patterns of usage (the way a teenager uses ChatGPT after an hour of school versus an adult doing the same). If OpenAI identifies a user between the ages of 13 and 17 or identifies them as explicitly identifying themselves as being in that range, the teen experience kicks in automatically. Otherwise, OpenAI takes the safer route and defaults to the teen mode rather than the adult one. Among these features are Study Mode where questions are answered with prompts in a Socratic manner. The Responsible Homework Reminder will remind a user to do work rather than simply copy-paste answers from ChatGPT. There are quizzes and visualizations of learning processes created with the help of teachers and child psychologists. And Study Hours where parents/teens can lock their ChatGPT session in study mode during specified hours. Guardrails become even more robust automatically in the case of self-harm, violence, eating disorders, and sexual content, in addition to specific design considerations that ensure that the language remains parent-like and not peer-like nor romantic-like, as per Misra, to steer clear of the emotional dependency which OpenAI has noticed from teenagers on AI. Parental Controls enable a parent account linked to the child's to manage some of these guardrails through Quiet Hours, sensitivity level control, and Study Hours activation. While parents cannot monitor the content of their teenager's chats with AI, they can be notified under certain very high-risk circumstances, and also separately, when OpenAI decides to suspend the teenager's account due to a violation of policy. The Codex Tangent Also read: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on AI's trust problem: Why skepticism isn't going away In its demonstration of Codex, an AI agent specialized for coding tasks, OpenAI reserved Codex a separate slide in the presentation entitled "Building with Codex." The pitch: the information about how kids spend time at school is dispersed across the school portal, email, calendar, app for sports activities, reminders about payments, and WhatsApp; all those pieces of information get updated at various hours of the day. The concept illustrated in the slide: the user (parent) asks Codex what should be paid attention to, and it collects all those scattered pieces of information (the worksheet is due tomorrow, you need to sign the permission slip, and football practice is now scheduled at 5:30 PM) into one place, the illustrated "Family Dashboard" with tabs for academics, calendar, activities, messages, forms and fees, and wellbeing. OpenAI used explicitly clear framing regarding parents' control: "Codex reads, organizes, and suggests actions" with the "review and approve" process when, according to the slide, "you stay in control." It may be pointed out that the slide is a concept illustration with a mockup but not a real demo or a screenshot from the shipped version; also, the concept is outside the feature list of ChatGPT for Teens. A Timeline, Not A One-Off This new announcement is not a singular launch but is actually part of an overall rollout process that has been planned by OpenAI for the last year. Study Mode was officially launched in August 2025 as OpenAI invited educators and child psychologists to develop the model according to the way it should react to the students and not just give answers. The ChatGPT for teens announced today can actually be considered as the enhanced version of the same concept. The Takeaway As India is home to the largest number of students using ChatGPT from OpenAI, the new features, such as age prediction, study mode as default, and notifications for parents based on policy violations, are all targeted towards this audience. In her personal testimony, Misra revealed that she had always been a student who was "always looking for shortcuts." It now remains to be seen whether the age prediction feature, which depends on handwriting and usage behavior, works effectively with this group of students.