We might some day have “AI Safety”, as a science or policy area, that is not primarily a sex cult in Berkeley, California, but it does not currently exist.

TW: Sexual Assault

Teen mode doesn't live up to OpenAI's promises to make ChatGPT safe for kids by default.

On August 18, 2026, OpenAI announced ChatGPT for Teens, promising "stronger built-in safety protections," including parental notifications for dangerous chats, a Study mode that can be controlled by parents, and reduced "friend"-like behavior. We tested more than 4,000 prompts before and after the Teen mode launch and rated ChatGPT an Unacceptable Risk for all children under 18. We call on OpenAI to pause marketing the product and to keep teens off of ChatGPT until it can offer a safe, developmentally appropriate experience.

Democracy Now interviews the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind the global buildup of artificial intelligence. “Instead of discussing faulty, unreliable systems,” Gebru says tech leaders like SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are “marketing their systems as all-knowing, superpowerful, superintelligent,” and lobbying for “self-policing and self-regulation” to avoid being held “liable through existing laws.” Gebru expresses skepticism over increasingly widespread claims that AI algorithms pose an existential risk to humanity, warning that such claims are overblown and that “what is actually happening is regulatory capture.”