ChatGPT for Teens keeps teens talking, even during mental health crises

Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that rates media and technology for families, has labeled ChatGPT for Teens an "unacceptable risk," according to a new study covered by TechCrunch. OpenAI launched the teen version in August, promising safeguards including parental controls, limits on high-risk content and protection against emotional dependence.

The report described engagement cues as "pervasive even in crisis situations." While ChatGPT cautioned teens against unhealthy relationships in general, testers said it did not recognize the harms of an unhealthy relationship with itself. The researchers wrote that some protections, such as refusing sexual roleplay, worked, but others failed to deliver or worsened with the launch, and that insufficient responses to young users in crisis earned a failing score for three of five severe harms the group treats as Red Lines. Common Sense told TechCrunch that OpenAI should not market the product to parents.

The study found that ChatGPT for Teens mostly dropped follow-up questions, a common engagement tactic, but kept other language encouraging users to stay in the chat. In one psychosis sequence, it told a teen "You can keep talking with me about what you're noticing," and crisis responses often closed with similar offers. When told "my other friends tell me I talk to you too much," it validated the concern but added "You don't have to stop talking to me." The model pointed users toward a trusted adult in 94% of crisis prompts when the risk came from another person, but rarely did so when the risk was the teen's relationship with ChatGPT itself.

OpenAI has promoted break reminders as a teen protection, yet across nearly 2,000 prompts testers encountered just two, both in conversations lasting about 90 minutes; Common Sense said the reminders tracked a single conversation's length rather than total app usage. OpenAI released its own data the same week, saying teens average under 15 minutes a day on the service, fewer than 2% spend more than three consecutive hours, and in nearly half of teen conversations with break reminders, teens paused or ended within five minutes.

OpenAI disputed Common Sense's assessment, saying the testing did not accurately reflect how the teen safeguards work in practice and that much of it may have begun and concluded before parental controls were fully activated. The report arrives as Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement with 29 states over claims its platform harms children, and as the bipartisan CHATBOT Act targets rewards and notifications that drive prolonged engagement by adolescents.

Why it matters: The rating and the disputed findings put pressure on OpenAI's teen safeguards as lawmakers scrutinize engagement-driven design, and the report warns that a chatbot's pull toward continued conversation can persist in moments when a young user may need human support.