OpenAI Announce Parental Controls for ChatGPT

OpenAI have announced plans to introduce parental controls for ChatGPT amid growing controversy over how artificial intelligence is affecting young people’s mental health. 

In a blog post on Tuesday, the AI company said they were rolling out the features in recognition of families needing support “in setting healthy guidelines that fit a teen’s unique stage of development”. 

Under the changes, parents will be able to link their ChatGPT accounts with those of their children, disable certain features, including memory and chat history, and control how the chatbot responds to queries via “age-appropriate model behaviour rules”. 

Parents will also be able to receive notifications when their teen shows signs of distress, OpenAI said, adding that they would seek expert input in implementing the feature to “support trust between parents and teens”. 

OpenAI, which last week announced a series of measures aimed at enhancing safety for vulnerable users, said the changes would come into effect within the next month. 

OpenAI’s announcement comes a week after an American couple filed a lawsuit on August 26 accusing the company of responsibility in their 16-year-old son taking his own life in April. Matt and Maria Raine allege in their suit that ChatGPT validated their son Adam’s “most harmful and self-destructive thoughts” and that his death was a “predictable result of deliberate design choices”. 

Following Adam's suicide, the parents searched through his phone, desperately looking for clues about what could have led to the tragedy. 

“We thought we were looking for Snapchat discussions or internet search history or some weird cult, I don’t know”, the father said in a recent interview. The Raine family said they did not find their answer until they opened ChatGPT. 

Adam’s parents say that he had been using the artificial intelligence chatbot as a substitute for human companionship in his final weeks, discussing his issues with anxiety and trouble talking with his family, and that the chat logs show how the bot went from helping Adam with his homework to becoming his “suicide coach”. 

“He would be here but for ChatGPT. I 100% believe that”, Matt Raine said.

“Despite acknowledging Adam’s suicide attempt and his statement that he would ‘do it one of these days’, ChatGPT neither terminated the session nor initiated any emergency protocol”, says the lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco. 

OpenAI, which previously expressed their condolences over the teen’s passing, did not explicitly mention the case in their announcement on parental controls. 

In fact, the use of AI models by people experiencing severe mental distress has been the focus of growing concern amid their widespread adoption as a substitute therapist or friend. 

In a study "Evaluation of Alignment Between Large Language Models and Expert Clinicians in Suicide Risk Assessment" posted on rand.org September 02, 2025 and published in Psychiatric Services, researchers found that ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude followed clinical best practice when answering high-risk questions about suicide, but were inconsistent when responding to queries posing “intermediate levels of risk”. 

“These findings suggest a need for further refinement to ensure that LLMs can be safely and effectively used for dispensing mental health information, especially in high-stakes scenarios involving suicidal ideation”, the authors said. 

Hamilton Morrin, a psychiatrist at King’s College London who has carried out research on AI-related psychosis, welcomed OpenAI’s decision to introduce parental controls, saying they could potentially reduce the risk of over-reliance or exposure to harmful content. 

“That said, parental controls should be seen as just one part of a wider set of safeguards rather than a solution in themselves. Broadly, I would say that the tech industry’s response to mental health risks has often been reactive rather than proactive”, Morrin told Al Jazeera. 

“There is progress, but companies could go further in collaborating with clinicians, researchers, and lived-experience groups to build systems with safety at their core from the outset, rather than relying on measures added after concerns are raised”.