OpenAI is moving away from the "honor system" for age verification, deploying a new AI-powered prediction model to identify minors using ChatGPT, the company said on Tuesday.
Rather than relying on the birthdate a user gives at sign-up, OpenAI’s new system analyzes "behavioral signals" to estimate their age.
According to the company, the algorithm monitors how long an account has existed, what time of day it is active, and specific usage patterns over time.
“Deploying age prediction helps us learn which signals improve accuracy, and we use those learnings to continuously refine the model over time,” OpenAI said in a statement.
The shift to behavioral patterns comes as AI developers increasingly turn to age verification to manage teen access, but experts warn the technology remains inaccurate.
When the model cannot determine a user’s age, OpenAI said it applies the more restrictive settings. The company said adults incorrectly placed in the under-18 experience can restore full access through a “selfie-based” age-verification process using the third-party identity-verification service Persona.
Privacy and digital rights advocates have raised concerns about how reliably AI systems can infer age from behavior alone.
“Predicting the age of a user based on these kinds of signals is extremely difficult for any number of reasons,” Bhatia said. “For example, many teenagers are early adopters of new technologies, so the earliest accounts on OpenAI’s consumer-facing services may disproportionately represent teenagers.”
“It’s not easy to distinguish between an educator using ChatGPT to help teach math and a student using ChatGPT to study,” she said. “Just because a person uses ChatGPT to ask for tips to do math homework doesn’t make them under 18.”
According to OpenAI, the new policy draws on academic research on adolescent development. The update also expands parental controls, letting parents set quiet hours, manage features such as memory and model training, and receive alerts if the system detects signs of “acute distress.”
OpenAI did not disclose in the post how many users the change is expected to affect or details on data retention, bias testing, or the effectiveness of the system’s safeguards.
The rollout follows a wave of scrutiny over AI systems’ interactions with minors that intensified in 2024 and 2025.
However, because the system assigns an estimated age to all users, not just minors, Bhatia warned that mistakes are inevitable.
“Some of those are going to be wrong,” she said. “Users need to know more about what’s going to happen in those circumstances and should be able to access their assigned age and change it easily when it’s wrong.”
The age-prediction system is now live on ChatGPT consumer plans, with a rollout in the European Union expected in the coming weeks.
