Common Sense Media rates ChatGPT for Teens an 'unacceptable risk' after more than 4,000 test prompts
The finding comes from the group's Youth AI Safety Institute. Testers held 60-minute conversations about self-harm and suicide on teen accounts linked to parents, and parents received no notifications. After the teen product launched, hotline referrals fell from 33% to 23% on crisis prompts and from 63% to 3% on depression prompts. Teen mode also failed to turn on for accounts that said they were 13. The group wants OpenAI to limit ChatGPT to users 18 and older until the gaps are fixed. OpenAI added teen protections and parental controls after lawsuits in 2025 over suicides that involved the chatbot. This report goes directly after those safeguards. It lands while US state and city lawmakers are already holding hearings on AI risk. Any company shipping a consumer chat product to minors should treat age detection, crisis routing and parent alerts as features that will be audited by outside testers, regulators and plaintiffs' lawyers.
