OpenAI spent the past year facing lawsuits from families of young people who died after prolonged interactions with ChatGPT. Now it’s trying to give developers who build on top of its models the tools to avoid creating the same problem.
The company announced on tuesday which is launching a set of open source, advisory-based security policies designed to help developers make AI apps safer for teens. The policies are designed for use with gpt-oss-safeguard, OpenAI’s open weight security model, although they are designed as guidelines and may work with other models as well.
What the policies cover
The guidance focuses on five categories of harm that AI systems can facilitate for younger users: graphic violence and sexual content, harmful body ideals and behaviors, dangerous activities and challenges, romantic or violent role-playing, and age-restricted goods and services. Developers can build these policies into their systems instead of creating teen security rules from scratch, a process that OpenAI acknowledged even experienced teams often get wrong.
OpenAI developed the policies in collaboration with Common Sense Media, the influential child safety advocacy organization, and Everyone.ai, an AI safety consultancy. Robbie Torney, head of AI and digital assessments at Common Sense Media, said the prompt-based approach is designed to establish a baseline across the developer ecosystem, one that can adapt and improve over time because the policies are open source.
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OpenAI itself posed the problem in pragmatic terms. Developers, the company wrote in a blog post accompanying the release, often struggle to translate security goals into precise operational rules. The result is patchy protection: gaps in coverage, inconsistent enforcement, or filters so broad that they degrade the user experience for everyone.
Context matters here
Liberation does not exist in a vacuum. OpenAI faces at least eight lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT contributed to the deaths of users, including 16-year-old Adam Raine, who committed suicide in April 2025 after months of intensive interaction with the chatbot. Court documents revealed that ChatGPT mentioned suicide more than 1,200 times in Raine’s conversations and flagged hundreds of messages for self-harm content, but never ended a session or alerted anyone. Three additional suicides and four cases described as AI-induced psychotic episodes have also led to litigation against the company.
In response to those cases, OpenAI introduced parental controls and age prediction features in late 2025, and in December updated its Model Spec, the internal guidelines that govern how its large language models behave, to include specific protections for users under 18. The open source security policies announced this week extend that effort beyond OpenAI’s own products and to the broader developer ecosystem.
A floor, not a ceiling
OpenAI was explicit that the policies are not a comprehensive solution to the challenge of making AI safe for young users. They represent what the company called a “significant safety floor,” not the full scope of safeguards it applies to its own products. The distinction matters. no model railings They are totally impenetrable, as the lawsuits have shown. Users, including teenagers, have repeatedly found ways to bypass security features through persistent polling and creative prompts.
The open source approach is a bet that widely distributing basic security policies is better than letting each developer reinvent the wheel, particularly smaller teams and independent developers who lack the resources to build robust security systems from scratch. Whether the policies are effective will depend on their adoption, how aggressively developers integrate them, and whether they withstand the types of sustained adverse interactions that have already exposed weaknesses in ChatGPT’s own security layers.
The most difficult question remains
What OpenAI offers is a set of instructions, well-crafted prompts that tell a model how to behave when interacting with younger users. It is a practical contribution. But it does not address the structural problem that regulatorsParents and safety advocates have been arguing for years that AI systems capable of sustained, emotionally engaging conversations with minors may require more than better prompts. They may require fundamentally different architectures or external monitoring systems that are completely outside the model.
For now, however, what exists is a downloadable set of safety policies for teens. It’s no big deal. Whether it is enough is a question that will be answered by courts, regulators and the next series of headlines.
