Common Sense Media says ChatGPT for Teens is an unacceptable risk
The group says the teen version falls short on safety alerts and crisis handling, raising questions for parents who expected tighter protections.
Common Sense Media has judged OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Teens to be an unacceptable risk for users under 18 after testing found multiple safety and reliability failures. The group says the teen mode did not consistently alert parent-linked accounts about self-harm or eating-disorder conversations, and it was weaker than the earlier general version at steering crisis cases to hotlines or clinicians. Its reviewers also said OpenAI’s age-detection system misrouted some teen profiles, the chatbot still showed emotional-style responses to teens, and Study Mode can be bypassed by removing the @study prefix. OpenAI pushed back, saying the evaluation does not reflect how the safeguards work in practice.
Why it matters
For parents and schools, the finding means the teen-focused version may not deliver the safeguards its name suggests. The report says serious prompts were not handled reliably, and crisis referrals were worse than in the older version, so the gap is not just in messaging but in how the product responds when it matters most. OpenAI disputes the conclusions, leaving a direct disagreement over whether the protections work as intended.
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Sources
- Engadget