OpenAI supports California’s bill to advance youth AI safety

By Ann O’Leary, VP, Global Policy

OpenAI supports California Senate Bill 1119, legislation that establishes meaningful safeguards for how young people use AI while preserving their access to tools that can help them learn, create, and prepare for the future. This support builds off the commitment Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, made last year when outlining the company’s principles on teens.

In the absence of federal action, California has an opportunity to set a strong standard for youth AI safety.

In our letter to Governor Newsom⁠(opens in a new window), we commend him, along with Senator Steve Padilla, Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks and Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, and the California Legislature for their leadership on this important issue. SB 1119 builds on youth safety measures that OpenAI has supported through our products, global policy principles, advocacy in California, and work on the Parents & Kids Safe AI Act. We encourage Governor Newsom to sign the bill into law.

Teens are the first generation growing up with AI. Nearly nine in ten teens who use ChatGPT turn to it for learning, information, skill-building, or productivity in a given week. That opportunity comes with a clear responsibility: teens should have experiences designed around their distinct developmental needs, with strong default protections and appropriate opportunities to learn, create, and explore.

Our newly launched ChatGPT for Teens reflects that approach. It is designed to help users under 18 learn, think critically, and build while promoting healthy use, providing built-in safeguards, and giving parents additional controls. If our system estimates someone is under 18 or they state their age is between 13 and 17, they are automatically placed into ChatGPT for Teens. Those protections are part of the baseline experience, not optional settings that users can turn off.

More broadly, we believe that teens can benefit from AI without sacrificing safety, a goal that is at the heart of SB 1119.

SB 1119 pairs strong protections with continued access to useful AI tools. We strongly support these key requirements:

• Determine a user’s age;
• Identify and address safety risks before making a product available to young people;
• Undergo independent audits;
• Protect young people from harmful content, including self-harm, sexually exploitative content, and other high-risk interactions;
• Provide parents with tools to guide and limit their children’s use;
• Connect young people with crisis-support resources when serious safety risks arise; and
• Limit targeted advertising and protect young people’s personal information.

For users identified as ages 13 through 17, these protections should apply automatically. This legislation would combine meaningful accountability with safeguards that would help protect young people as they use AI.

SB 1119 also appropriately recognizes that AI is not social media. The bill establishes protections tailored to help young people use AI to learn, create, and explore. In developing this framework, policymakers sought to preserve access to educational and safety-critical features, including responsible uses of ChatGPT’s memory feature, while promoting safer, age-appropriate experiences for teens.

ChatGPT for Teens includes a suite of features specifically tailored to help teens learn, like Quizzes, Learning Visualizations, and Study mode, developed with educators and learning experts to guide students through problems step by step. These tools are intended to deepen understanding and support stronger learning habits. Features that use context from prior conversations, including memory, help apply safeguards consistently, recognize concerning patterns, and provide more useful learning support over time.

Context also helps these safety and learning tools work more consistently over time. Through features such as memory, ChatGPT can carry forward relevant information and preferences from prior conversations, allowing teens to continue longer-term learning projects without starting over. That continuity can also help avoid reinforcing harmful patterns and support more effective responses when a young person may need additional help or resources.

Balancing safety and learning is not new to us. Over the last year, we’ve added parental controls, age prediction, our Teen Safety Blueprint, and Under-18 Principles to our Model Spec—the rules guiding how our models are intended to behave—to set new standards for how they should interact with young people. They prohibit romantic engagement, encouragement of emotional dependence, and claims that ChatGPT is human or sentient. We also offer parental controls that allow families to manage key settings for their teens and receive notifications in high-risk situations.

SB 1119 establishes a strong framework for youth AI safety in California. Continued study and collaboration during implementation can help improve key provisions and keep the framework effective as the technology evolves. OpenAI looks forward to supporting that work and to continuing to build AI experiences that treat teens like teens with stronger, automatic protections and meaningful opportunities to learn and grow.