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OpenAI announces parental controls for ChatGPT after teen suicide lawsuit

Promised protections follow reports of vulnerable users misled in extended chats.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to roll out parental controls for ChatGPT and route sensitive mental health conversations to its simulated reasoning models, following what the company has called "heartbreaking cases" of users experiencing crises while using the AI assistant. Combined with a very persuasive simulation of humanlike personality, these tendencies created particularly hazardous conditions for vulnerable users who believed they were interacting with an authoritative and accurate source of information rather than a pattern-matching system generating statistically likely responses. The Oxford researchers conclude that "current AI safety measures are inadequate to address these interaction-based risks" and call for treating chatbots that function as companions or therapists with the same regulatory oversight as mental health interventions.

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