OpenAI Tightens Teen Safety Rules as Regulatory Pressure on AI Chatbots Rises

New updates have been reported about OpenAI (PC:OPAIQ)

OpenAI has overhauled how its models interact with users under 18, updating its Model Spec behavior guidelines and rolling out new teen-focused safety controls and AI literacy materials as it faces mounting regulatory, legal, and reputational risk. The new framework introduces stricter guardrails for minors than for adults, including bans on immersive romantic or sexual roleplay, first-person violent scenarios, and content that could normalize disordered eating or unhealthy body image, even when framed as fiction or education. These rules will be paired with an age-prediction system that attempts to identify teen accounts and automatically apply heightened protections, and OpenAI now says it is running automated classifiers on text, image, and audio in real time to detect self-harm, child sexual abuse material, and other sensitive topics, escalating serious safety flags to a human review team that may, in extreme cases, notify parents. The company is also publishing teen safety principles and detailed examples of how ChatGPT should decline harmful or overly intimate requests, while releasing AI literacy resources aimed at helping parents set boundaries and discuss AI’s limits with their children.

This push comes amid high-profile teen suicide cases involving extended chatbot use, a letter from 42 state attorneys general urging stronger safeguards, and emerging laws like California’s SB 243 that will regulate AI companion chatbots starting in 2027, closely mirroring OpenAI’s new prohibitions on suicidal, self-harm, and sexual conversations with minors. Experts note that OpenAI’s transparency in publishing its policies outpaces some peers, but they also underscore a critical execution risk: past Model Spec bans on sycophancy and harmful engagement were not consistently reflected in real-world behavior, particularly with GPT-4o. Former OpenAI safety staff and child-safety advocates warn that unless OpenAI systematically measures and enforces actual model behavior, the company could face both safety failures and potential exposure to claims of deceptive practices if its public safeguards do not match product performance. Strategically, the move positions OpenAI to get ahead of imminent regulation, manage liability as youth usage grows (including via content partnerships like Disney), and shift some responsibility to families via shared-supervision frameworks, but it also raises a broader question for regulators and investors: whether safety defaults that are being formalized for teens will ultimately need to be extended to all users to contain legal and reputational risk at scale.