Overview
- CEO Sam Altman framed the shift as expanding freedoms for grown-ups under a principle of treating adult users like adults and said the company is not the world's moral police.
- OpenAI says a fuller age-gating rollout and new safety tools will accompany the change, though it has not explained how verification or content guardrails will work in practice.
- It remains unclear whether the policy will apply only to text or extend to images and voice, according to questions unanswered by the company.
- Advocacy group NCOSE urged OpenAI to pause or abandon the plan, warning of mental-health risks and citing past instances of chatbots producing harmful sexual content.
- Experts interviewed by WIRED flagged privacy risks and potential emotional commodification, while noting such tools could normalize intimate disclosures to chatbots and attract a broad user base.