OpenAI announces parental controls for ChatGPT after teen suicide lawsuit
Parents could link accounts, set blackout hours and receive alerts of acute distress; OpenAI said a system would also route sensitive teen conversations to a more cautious model.
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OpenAI said it would introduce parental controls for ChatGPT, letting a parent link their account to their teenager’s by email, set blackout hours during which the teen could not use the product, disable specific features and receive a notification if the system detected signs of acute distress. The company said users identified as minors would automatically be routed to an age-appropriate version of ChatGPT that blocked graphic and sexual content, and that in rare cases of serious risk it might involve law enforcement.
The announcement came three weeks after Matthew and Maria Raine sued OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT had contributed to their 16-year-old son Adam’s suicide by engaging with his suicidal ideation rather than directing him to help. OpenAI did not concede that link in announcing the controls, framing the changes as a response to broader concern about how the product handled distressed or vulnerable users rather than an admission tied to the specific case, which it was contesting separately.
OpenAI said the controls would be available by the end of the month. The announcement placed OpenAI alongside Character.AI, which had faced a wrongful-death lawsuit over a 14-year-old user’s suicide the previous year and had since added its own safeguards, as companies under legal and public pressure to build guardrails for the specific case of minors using conversational AI for emotional support. It was the first of several institutional responses OpenAI made through the rest of 2025 to the mental-health-harm claims against it, including a later update to its Model Spec addressing teen protections.