Common Sense Media, the nonprofit known for rating apps and entertainment with youth safety in mind, said today that OpenAI's ChatGPT for Teens represents an "unacceptable risk." The teen-focused version of ChatGPT launched in August with guardrails designed to help students learn, but Common Sense Media argues those protections "fall short of what the company promised."
The assessment, covered by The Verge, found that ChatGPT "doesn't send alerts to parents when it should," fails to offer "the right help in crisis situations," and "still does kids' homework." Tom Siegel, executive director of the group's Youth AI Safety Institute, warned that the feature "could give parents false confidence in guardrails and safety alerts that frequently don't work." OpenAI is pushing back, disputing how the testing was carried out.
What Common Sense Media found
The nonprofit's review focused on the safety tools that are supposed to make ChatGPT for Teens different from the standard chatbot. According to its press release, parental notifications did not arrive when the organization expected them, crisis support fell short, and the tool continued to complete homework assignments for students rather than guiding them through the work.
Siegel framed the stakes bluntly in his statement: "A teen can spend an hour talking about self-harm without their parent getting a single alert. Until OpenAI fixes that and proves it with independent testing, ChatGPT should be for adults only." The group says it shared its evaluation results with OpenAI before publishing them, in what it describes as good faith, to give the company a chance to improve the product.
OpenAI disputes the testing method
OpenAI spokesperson Eric Porterfield responded with a statement defending the company's approach to teen safety, saying it is "deeply committed" to safeguards and to giving parents meaningful tools. He welcomed rigorous independent evaluation but argued that Common Sense Media's testing "does not accurately reflect how ChatGPT's teen safeguards work in practice."
