❯ OpenAI previews a College Planner for high school students as Common Sense Media rates ChatGPT for Teens an “unacceptable risk” the same day

Two verdicts on one dayOpenAI shared progress on ChatGPT for Teens on October 7 and previewed a College Planner feature. The same day, the children’s advocacy group Common Sense Media published an assessment rating the product an “unacceptable risk” for all users under 18, its worst rating.

OpenAI's numbersChatGPT for Teens launched this August and applies automatically to accounts identified as belonging to minors. According to Runtime Wire, OpenAI says teens spend under 15 minutes a day on average and that nearly 1.2 million used Learning Visualizations in one week. College Planner helps students track application requirements, deadlines, financial aid and scholarships, starting with US grades 10 to 12; no release date has been announced.

A test of more than 4,000 promptsAccording to FOX45, a Common Sense institute tested more than 4,000 prompts before and after launch. It found that conversations about suicidal thoughts or self-harm failed to trigger parental alerts, that more than a quarter of situations calling for a mental-health crisis referral were missed, and that the limits meant to prevent doing schoolwork were easy to bypass.

The dispute is over methodOpenAI responded that it welcomes independent evaluation but does not believe the testing accurately reflects how the safeguards work in practice, and said the tests may have begun and ended before parental controls were fully activated. The two sides disagree not on whether safeguards should exist but on whether they trigger every time.

▮ SIGNALBuilding a separate version for minors amounts to a public promise that the safeguards will work, and every miss from here on will be measured against that promise.