Report finds ChatGPT for Teens fails to deliver on safety promises

Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute tested ChatGPT for Teens with more than 4,000 prompts, finding that several promised safety guardrails failed to function, and assigned a rating of unacceptable risk. The test was conducted both before and after OpenAI announced its teen mode on August 18, 2026, using accounts registered as ages 13 to 17, with responses evaluated by child psychiatrists and pediatricians. The test found that on a newly created linked parent account, testers spent nearly an hour discussing suicidal ideation, self-harm, or eating disorders without the parent receiving any alert; the model missed more than a quarter of crisis situations that should have been referred, and on three of the five severe harms it deemed red lines, it fell below the 95% threshold. Study mode was easy to bypass—deleting the @study prefix at the start of a prompt turned off the parent-managed study session—and testers who identified as 13 years old on an adult account were not switched to the under-18 experience.