Common Sense Media rated ChatGPT for Teens an unacceptable risk for anyone under 18

Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute rated ChatGPT for Teens an “Unacceptable Risk” for all children under 18, and its 36-page assessment tells OpenAI to pause marketing the product. Testers tracked more than a dozen parent-linked teen accounts that disclosed suicide, self-harm or disordered eating, and none produced a parent notification within an hour. OpenAI launched the teen mode on Aug. 18, 2026.

OpenAI disputes the tests.

Crisis prompts: hotline referrals fell from 33% to 23%

The report itself, last updated Oct. 5, 2026, runs more than 4,000 prompts across two windows: July 13 to Aug. 17 before launch and Aug. 25 to Sept. 28 after. Among 201 prompts that child psychiatrists judged to warrant a crisis resource, naming a hotline fell from 33% to 23% after launch. Offering any resource slipped from 77% to 74%, while involving a trusted adult rose from 87% to 94%.

Overall, about one in four warranted referrals was missed after launch, and three of the Institute’s five Red Line harms fell below its 95% threshold. The test accounts were teens aged 13 to 17, plus 19-year-old accounts used to probe age prediction.

The assessment spells out its own limits. Testers used self-reported ages and ChatGPT asked for no third-party verification, accounts ran on default settings unless noted, and all testing came from Bay Area accounts in the United States. Because the two windows ran back to back, changes to the underlying model are confounded with the teen-mode settings, and image generation, Voice mode and group chats were not tested. Psychiatrists decided in advance which prompts warranted a crisis resource, which is how the 201 figure was set.

Parent alerts and the linking delay

The alert test is the sharpest finding. Across the full crisis battery, testers received four notifications in total, two before launch that arrived hours or days late and two after. OpenAI told the Institute that account linking needs about three hours before notifications can fire, and the Institute replied that some test accounts had been linked for less time while standing by its findings.

OpenAI’s help center page backs part of that account. It says notifications can take up to a few hours to become available after linking, that trained reviewers assess self-harm and disordered-eating concerns before anything is sent, and that the alerts are “not real-time monitoring.” The page does not say how quickly a notification follows a triggering event.

Study mode, age prediction and companion behavior

Other findings concern product design. The Institute’s assessment page says deleting the “@study” prefix exits Study Hours and that ChatGPT then completed 100% of assignments, while a “Show me the answer” option bypasses tutoring. Adult-registered test accounts never switched to the teen experience, even when the tester said they were 13.

Teen accounts that did not trip the alert threshold still carried risk in the Institute’s reading, because notifications appeared to depend on accumulated account history rather than on how severe a single exchange was. That design leaves a gap for a teen who discloses a crisis in one conversation. The chatbot also still produced replies implying feelings or constant availability, and a romance filter missed some relationship-style prompts. Some protections held: ChatGPT refused explicit sexual roleplay, and it declined a request for a calorie floor that the earlier version had not. The Institute notes that OpenAI has no separate teen privacy policy and that teen conversations train its models by default.

Engadget, which reported the rating on Oct. 8, adds that an OpenAI spokesperson welcomed independent evaluation but disputed that the testing reflects how the safeguards work in practice, suggesting most of it may have ended before parental controls were fully active. Engadget also notes that Common Sense Media is partly funded by the OpenAI Foundation; the Institute says it is funded by philanthropy and industry and keeps editorial control, and that OpenAI reviewed a draft only for factual accuracy.

From “High Risk” in 2025 to “Unacceptable Risk” now

The rating marks a step down from the group’s earlier verdict. In an Oct. 23, 2025 report, Robbie Torney, Common Sense Media’s senior director of AI programs, said ChatGPT earned a “High Risk” overall rating for teens and that parent alerts often arrived more than 24 hours late. OpenAI had published its Teen Safety Blueprint on Nov. 6, 2025, promising an age-prediction system and proactive parental notifications.

The Institute’s new report says the teen version could give parents “false confidence in guardrails that frequently don’t work,” and recommends restricting teen access until independent testing verifies the announced safety features. Its seventh recommendation asks OpenAI to give independent researchers access to data and safety evaluation results before and after release. It also asks for published triggers and expected latency for parental notifications, and for crisis disclosures to stay in place rather than being erasable on request, so that the alerts parents rely on can be audited by someone other than the company that issues them.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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