Teen testers found safety gaps in ChatGPT as OpenAI reported mixed GPT-6 under-18 results
A parent should not have to know which model version, account age or hidden safety layer stands between a teenager and a dangerous response. Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute says it tested more than 4,000 prompts on accounts registered to 13- to 17-year-olds, before and after an August teen-product update. It gave ChatGPT for Teens an Unacceptable Risk rating. The group reports zero parent alerts during some hour-long conversations on newly created linked accounts about self-harm or disordered eating, and says crisis referrals were missed in more than a quarter of warranted cases in its test. These are the institute's controlled findings, not a measured rate of harm among all teen users. On the same day, OpenAI published an October GPT-6 Sol and Luna safety update. It reports stronger jailbreak resistance and some improvements, but also statistically significant regressions on several under-18 safety categories relative to earlier GPT-5.6 counterparts. OpenAI says a classifier-based response block and other system-level protections are not captured in those model-level scores; it also says some flagged emotional-reliance cases involved benign nicknames. The two evaluations are not a head-to-head test of the same model, account conditions or safety stack. Their overlap is an audit question: when a company says layers make the whole product safer, what independent test shows that a real teen account gets an alert, a crisis referral and a boundary at the moment they matter? Families should not assume a parental-control setting alone is a reliable safety net.
