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OpenAI Rolls Out Parental Controls, Crisis Alerts and Safety-Focused Model Switching for ChatGPT

The rollout follows a lawsuit alleging ChatGPT aided a teen's suicide, prompting OpenAI to tighten protections for minors.

Overview

  • Parents can now link their accounts to a teen’s account to set quiet hours, enforce stricter content settings, disable voice and image generation, turn off memory, and control data use.
  • For linked teen accounts, ChatGPT blocks sexual, romantic or violent roleplay and filters categories such as viral challenges and extreme beauty ideals.
  • A trained review-and-notify system flags suspected acute self-harm risk and, if confirmed, alerts linked parents by email, SMS and push, while withholding full chat transcripts to protect teen privacy.
  • For sensitive or emotionally charged topics, ChatGPT can switch in the background to a reasoning model or a GPT-5 “chat-safety” variant, a change described publicly by ChatGPT head Nick Turley.
  • The features are live in multiple markets including Germany, with automated age estimation still in development and ongoing questions about detection reliability and privacy trade-offs.