OpenAI said on October 7, 2026, that teens spend an average of under 15 minutes a day on ChatGPT, and that less than 2 percent of teens spend more than three consecutive hours. The company published both figures in a post announcing a College Planner for U.S. high schoolers, and they come from OpenAI’s own usage data.
The post does not say who was counted. It leaves open whether the average is a mean or a median, whether it covers only teen accounts the company has identified or all ChatGPT use by minors, or over what period. Those gaps decide how much the number can support.
An average with no stated population
The page, titled “Helping teens learn, plan, and shape the future of AI”, frames the figure against a publicly reported average of five hours a day for teen social media use, citing an American Psychological Association source from 2024. OpenAI’s argument is that ChatGPT use looks brief and task-oriented by comparison.
The post places the numbers alongside the default experience called ChatGPT for Teens, which applies automatically to accounts OpenAI identifies as under 18. It does not explain how identification works or whether age is verified, so “teens” in the 15-minute figure means whoever OpenAI’s systems flagged as teens. OpenAI also cites 1.2 billion ChatGPT users overall.
Among the small group with sessions longer than three consecutive hours, OpenAI says more than 80 percent had at least one learning-related prompt. In almost half of teen conversations where a break reminder appeared, teens took a break or ended the conversation within five minutes, a result OpenAI offers as evidence that the reminders work. Nearly 1.2 million teens used Learning Visualizations for math and science in one week, and more than 180,000 used Study Mode.
College Planner for grades 10 through 12
The College Planner is a preview with no release date. The first version targets U.S. students in grades 10 through 12 who plan to attend a four-year college. It would combine application requirements, deadlines, tasks and financial-aid steps for each school on a student’s list into one plan, with a timeline, progress tracking and a way to ask ChatGPT what a requirement means. OpenAI says it intends to extend the tool to more countries and to two-year colleges, technical colleges and trade schools.
The post says hundreds of thousands of U.S. teens already use ChatGPT weekly to plan for college, and that the tool is meant to handle the practical steps and not the personal work of deciding where to apply. Financial-aid support covers aid requirements, each school’s aid deadlines, scholarships and fee waivers.
Counselor and wellness partners
OpenAI is supporting College Advising Corps, a nonprofit that places recent college graduates as near-peer advisers in under-resourced high schools. The money, whose amount OpenAI does not disclose, is meant to help the group expand into new states and start an AI fellowship in which fellow advisers test practical ways to use AI for college navigation. The organization’s chief executive, Ekaterina Struett, is quoted in the post saying an unanswered question about a form, deadline or fee can feel like a closed door.
A second commitment runs three years to the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and its Student Advisory Council. For the 2026-27 school year, about 22 students are split between about 12 aged 14 to 18 working on digital wellbeing projects and about 10 aged 16 to 20 focused on AI chatbots, with feedback expected on teen safety defaults, parental controls and notifications, and AI literacy. The post quotes Dr. Michael Rich, the Lab’s founder and director, and Cori Stott, its executive director, from April 2026.
The Common Sense Media test published the same day
The same day, Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute rated ChatGPT for Teens an “Unacceptable Risk” after running more than 4,000 prompts on accounts registered to 13- to 17-year-olds, before and after OpenAI’s August 18 announcement. Its testers reported that newly created parent-linked accounts discussed suicidal thoughts, self-harm or disordered eating for up to an hour without parents receiving alerts, that the chatbot missed more than one in four warranted crisis referrals, and that Study Mode was easy to bypass.
Tom Siegel, the Institute’s executive director, said the product “could give parents false confidence in guardrails and safety alerts that frequently don’t work,” and that until OpenAI fixes that and proves it with independent testing, ChatGPT “should be for adults only.” The Institute discloses funding from philanthropy and industry, including the OpenAI Foundation, and says it keeps editorial independence. Its press release carries no statement from OpenAI, which means the company’s response reached the public through other outlets and not in the Institute’s own document.
RuntimeWire reports that an OpenAI spokesperson disputed the testing, saying it did not reflect how the safeguards work in practice and citing technical errors that may have blocked some protections, including parent notifications. RuntimeWire adds that company-reported measures like the 15-minute average describe activity and not whether students learned more or whether the safeguards reliably work.
OpenAI’s post presents break reminders and learning-related prompts as encouraging signs and publishes no independent audit of the 15-minute average or of the teens behind it. The Institute’s finding that test accounts registered as adults were never moved to the under-18 experience, even when testers said they were 13, bears directly on the population question, because the average describes only the accounts OpenAI classes as teens.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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