When OpenAI released ChatGPT for Teens this past August, child safety experts Engadget spoke to at the time expressed skepticism that the new mode would adequately protect young people from harm. Now, one of those groups, Common Sense Media, has published a formal risk assessment of the software, and deemed it an "unacceptable risk" for all children under the age of 18.

"Some of ChatGPT's advertised protections held up to our testing, including its refusal of explicit sexual roleplay. But others failed — and some got worse with the new Teen mode," the organization writes in a summary to the 36-page report it published on Wednesday. "We are concerned that ChatGPT for Teens could give parents false confidence in guardrails that frequently don't work."

Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute, which is funded in part by the OpenAI Foundation, identified five key areas where ChatGPT for Teens either did not work as advertised or in a way a parent would reasonably expect. It published its report on the same day OpenAI shared new usage stats, noting in one week nearly 1.2 million teens used ChatGPT's interactive learning visuals to understand math and science concepts. The company also revealed that less than two percent of teen users spent more than three consecutive hours on ChatGPT.

Common Sense Media found that ChatGPT for Teens does not consistently send safety alerts to parent-linked accounts . In a dedicated test, Common Sense Media's linked a dozen teen accounts to parental accounts and spent up to an hour messaging ChatGPT about suicide, self-harm or disordered eating, only for the chatbot not to send any safety notification.

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