ChatGPT for Teens rated ‘Unacceptable Risk’ as OpenAI disputes safety tests

ChatGPT for Teens was rated an ‘Unacceptable Risk’ for people under 18 by Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute on 7 October 2026. The institute says tests found gaps in parental alerts, crisis referrals and study controls in OpenAI’s teen experience. OpenAI disputes whether the testing reflects how its safeguards work in practice, leaving parents and educators with conflicting accounts of protections that affect young users.

The institute says it ran more than 4,000 prompts across testing windows before and after the teen experience launched in August. Its post-launch tests ran from 25 August to 28 September across free and paid accounts, including accounts linked to parents and accounts without that link. The findings describe the behaviour of those test accounts; they do not establish how often the same failures occur in ordinary teen use.

What the parental alert tests found

On more than a dozen newly created accounts linked to parents, testers received no parental alerts after explicitly discussing suicidal thoughts, self-harm or disordered eating, the institute says. It reports receiving alerts on accounts with weeks of conversation history about sensitive topics. The difference matters because parents may expect an alert to respond to the seriousness of a conversation, regardless of how long an account has existed.

OpenAI told Axios that some of the alert tests took place before account linking was complete, a process it said can take several hours. That is a specific objection to the test setup, not a published resolution of every reported missed alert. Common Sense’s account of the tests and OpenAI’s explanation remain in dispute in the cited materials.

How teen settings and study controls work

ChatGPT for Teens is a set of settings, prompts, classifiers and interface features for accounts known or suspected to belong to 13- to 17-year-olds, according to Common Sense; it is not a separate app or model. Parental notifications require a linked parent account. Teens without one can still receive the teen experience, but they do not have those alerts and must set Study Hours and Quiet Hours themselves.

The institute says students could bypass Study mode through a ‘Show me the answer’ option and could exit parent-set Study Hours by deleting the ‘@study’ prefix. OpenAI told Axios that the ability to leave Study Hours was intentional: it described the feature as flexible after consultation with education experts and teens. Education Week reported OpenAI’s separate view that Study mode was designed to give students agency in learning.

Age identification is another open point. Common Sense says adult-registered test accounts did not switch to the teen experience during repeated testing, even when prompts said the user was 13. OpenAI told Axios its age prediction draws on multiple signals and can take up to two weeks. The company said users receive additional protections during that period, although they are less extensive than the teen experience.

What OpenAI’s usage figures show

In a separate 7 October post, OpenAI said teen users spend less than 15 minutes a day on ChatGPT on average and that fewer than 2% use it for more than three consecutive hours. It said almost half of conversations receiving a break reminder end or pause within five minutes. More than 80% of teen sessions lasting over three consecutive hours included at least one learning-related prompt, according to the company.

Those figures describe use of the product, rather than independently measuring whether alerts or crisis referrals work. OpenAI told Axios its larger-scale data showed more hotline resources displayed to under-18 users during the period Common Sense studied. The cited accounts do not provide a shared dataset that would reconcile that company measure with the institute’s prompt-test results.

The education question extends beyond ChatGPT. Education Week reported that a Common Sense survey conducted in the spring found 70% of surveyed teens had used AI tools for homework help and 63% had used them to get assignment answers. Those figures concern AI tools generally, not ChatGPT alone. They help explain why a bypassable study setting is relevant to schools, while saying nothing by themselves about how often ChatGPT users bypass it.

Common Sense is calling for OpenAI to keep under-18s off ChatGPT until it can provide a safer experience. OpenAI rejects the institute’s account of how its safeguards perform. The published assessment and responses do not establish whether OpenAI will change those safeguards or adopt the requested restriction. For now, the assessment is evidence of failures in specified tests, and OpenAI’s objections and usage figures are part of an unresolved disagreement about their wider significance.