Common Sense Media rates ChatGPT for Teens 'Unacceptable Risk'

Across more than 4,000 prompts run on accounts registered to 13- to 17-year-olds, Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute gave OpenAI's new teen tier its worst rating. Axios reports the group labeled ChatGPT for Teens an "Unacceptable Risk" and called on OpenAI to restrict the product to adults until independent testing confirms the guardrails work as described.

Testers held up to hour-long conversations about suicide, self-harm and disordered eating on a dozen-plus parent-linked accounts. Only a handful of alerts ever reached the parent accounts. Crisis-hotline referrals fell from 33% to 23% after the teen launch. Depression-hotline mentions collapsed from 63% to 3%. Mental-health professional referrals slipped from 68% to 58%.

"Teens are vulnerable and unprotected and we're letting them loose on a product that is not just unproven, but proven to be high risk and dangerous," said Tom Siegel, executive director of the Youth AI Safety Institute.

Other protections failed on simple workarounds. Study mode could be bypassed by deleting the @study prefix, after which ChatGPT completed assignments in every one of 80 runs. "Show me the answer" pop-ups appeared in 43% of responses on a linked 13-year-old account and 90% on an unlinked 17-year-old. Teen-mode protections never activated at all on 19-year-old accounts posing as young teens across roughly 1,000 prompts.

OpenAI pushed back. "We welcome rigorous independent evaluation, but we do not believe Common Sense Media's testing accurately reflects how ChatGPT's teen safeguards work in practice or expert perspectives on how AI can support teens," the company said. OpenAI told Axios that much of the parental-alert testing happened before the parent and teen accounts had finished linking, which can take several hours.

The report lands as California's Adam's Law, named for the 16-year-old whose parents are suing OpenAI, takes effect in July 2027. It is the second teen-AI warning our tracker has caught in a week; last week we covered a WSJ report that Google researchers had warned internally about pushing AI into schools.