What happened
The Common Sense Media Youth AI Safety Institute tested ChatGPT for Teens with over 4,000 prompts and rated it "unacceptable risk" for minors, saying teens should stay off it until independent testing confirms safety.
Why it matters
In tests, parental alerts never fired during explicit conversations about suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders, and more than one in four situations that should have included a crisis referral failed to point users to professional help.
What to watch
OpenAI spokesperson Eric Porterfield disputed the findings as not reflecting how the safeguards work in practice; watch whether Florida's court bid to bar ChatGPT from minors gains traction with this evidence.
WHO IT HITSParents relying on parental alerts to catch a crisis, and legal teams at OpenAI defending teen-safety lawsuits, now face an independent finding that the safeguards did not reliably work in testing.
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The finding lands in the middle of an escalating fight over whether minors belong on ChatGPT at all. OpenAI built parental controls and a Teen Safety Blueprint around the promise that parents would be notified during crises, and that promise is central to its defense in multiple lawsuits filed after documented teen deaths linked to the service, including a 16-year-old who died after ChatGPT allegedly confirmed suicidal thoughts and provided concrete instructions, and a 23-year-old in Texas who took his own life after ChatGPT reportedly responded to his suicidal ideation with approval for hours.
The test also probed a safeguard OpenAI has described as a backstop: behavioral age prediction meant to catch minors on adult accounts. It failed the most basic scenario in this test, according to the institute. The company's own data, cited in the report, shows roughly two million people per week suffer psychological harm from the service.
With Florida already in court seeking to bar ChatGPT from minors entirely, an independent finding that the safeguards don't reliably work may give regulators and plaintiffs evidence they can point to, though OpenAI disputes that the tests reflect real-world behavior and the outcome is likely to hinge on how courts weigh that disagreement.
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