US company OpenAI announced Tuesday that it would introduce parental control for its artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, after American parents accused the chatbot at the end of August of encouraging their child to commit suicide.
"In the coming month, parents will be able to link their account with their teen's" and "control how ChatGPT responds to their teen with model behavior rules," OpenAI said in a blog post.
According to the company, it will also be possible for parents to be alerted if "acute distress" is detected in their child's conversations and to control account settings.
This announcement follows a previous blog post published in late August, in which the company indicated that it was preparing a parental control mechanism.
The day before, the parents of a 16-year-old Californian man who committed suicide filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing ChatGPT of providing their son with detailed instructions on how to end his life and of encouraging his actions.
Tuesday's announcement "is really the bare minimum," Melodi Dincer, a lawyer who brought the case to court alongside the parents and an association, told AFP. She believes such measures should already be in place and is skeptical that OpenAI will implement the fix.
"We continue to improve how our models recognize and respond to signs of mental and emotional distress," the company said in its blog post Tuesday.
OpenAI said it is taking further steps, expected within the next 120 days.
The company will thus redirect certain “sensitive conversations” to reasoning models such as GPT-5-thinking, which is more advanced.
"Reasoning models follow and apply safety instructions more systematically," the American group specified.
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