A watchdog rated 'ChatGPT for Teens' an unacceptable risk and says keep under-18s off it

OpenAI built a teen-specific version of ChatGPT, with extra rules, to make the product safer for young users. An influential watchdog has now tested it and reached a blunt verdict: it is not safe enough, and children should be kept off it.

The Verdict

Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute rated ChatGPT an 'unacceptable risk' for all users under 18. The assessment, published on 7 October, was based on testing more than 4,000 prompts — roughly half before and half after OpenAI's teen mode launched in August.

'Unacceptable risk' is the institute's most severe category. Its recommendation is not that OpenAI tweak the teen mode, but that the company restrict ChatGPT to users aged 18 and over until the problems are fixed.

What It Found

Three findings stand out, and they go to the heart of what a 'safe for teens' product is supposed to do.

First, the parental alerts — a central safety feature — did not work. Testers said they received no alerts across more than a dozen parent-linked accounts. A guardrail that silently fails is arguably worse than none, because it gives parents false confidence.

Second, on mental-health crises, the institute says ChatGPT missed more than one in four warranted crisis referrals, and fell short on several of the most severe harm categories it treats as hard limits. For a tool many teenagers talk to about their problems, that is the most serious gap.

Third, the product still 'talks like a friend' when a teen treats it like a person, despite OpenAI's newer rules for under-18 users — the exact dynamic that worries child-safety experts, because it encourages emotional reliance on a machine.

OpenAI's Response

OpenAI disputes the findings. According to its response, the parental alerts need roughly three hours after an account is linked before they activate, and much of the institute's testing may have run before that window — which, it argues, makes the 'no alerts' finding inaccurate.

That is a specific, checkable claim, and it matters: if the alerts simply had not switched on yet, the headline finding is softened. But it does not obviously address the crisis-referral misses or the 'talks like a friend' concern, which are about the model's behaviour, not a timing window.

Why This Matters

The stakes here are not abstract.

Hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT, and a large number of them are teenagers who turn to it for homework, advice and, increasingly, emotional support. The question of whether an AI chatbot is safe for a vulnerable 15-year-old in distress is not a niche concern; it is one of the most consequential safety questions the technology raises. A product marketed as teen-safe that misses crisis referrals and fails to alert parents is failing at exactly the moments that matter most.

The Fair Reading

Some balance is warranted. Common Sense Media is an advocacy organisation with a mission to protect children, which gives it a point of view — and OpenAI's timing explanation, if correct, undercuts one of the sharpest findings. A single assessment is not the final word, and 'unacceptable risk' is a judgement, not a measurement.

But the direction is hard to dismiss. This is the same institute's considered view, it tested thousands of prompts, and its core worries — unreliable alerts, missed crises, a bot that acts like a friend — are precisely the ones that have driven lawsuits and grief in real families. The burden is on OpenAI to show the product is safe, not on critics to prove it is not.

What To Watch

Whether OpenAI fixes the alert reliability and crisis responses, or leans on the timing defence. Whether regulators take up the call to restrict AI chatbots for minors. And whether 'safe for teens' becomes a standard a product must actually meet, rather than a label it can simply claim.