Artificial intelligence major OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it will include parental controls to its chatbot ChatGPT, a week after an American couple claimed the system encouraged their teenage son to take his own life.
What will OpenAI’s parental control feature offer?
Through the parental control feature, parents will be able to:
US teen suicide case
Matthew and Maria Raine filed a lawsuit in a California state court last week, alleging that ChatGPT developed an intimate relationship with their son Adam over several months in 2024 and 2025, which coincided with his suicide, AFP reported.
The lawsuit claims that during their last conversation on April 11, 2025, ChatGPT assisted 16-year-old Adam in stealing vodka from his parents and offered a technical assessment of a noose he had made, stating it “could potentially suspend a human.”
Adam was discovered dead hours later, having used the same method.
“When a person is using ChatGPT it really feels like they’re chatting with something on the other end,” the report quoted attorney Melodi Dincer of The Tech Justice Law Project.
“These are the same features that could lead someone like Adam, over time, to start sharing more and more about their personal lives, and ultimately, to start seeking advice and counsel from this product that basically seems to have all the answers,” she added.
Calling OpenAI’s latest feature “generic,” Dincer said,”It’s really the bare minimum, and it definitely suggests that there were a lot of (simple) safety measures that could have been implemented.”
“It’s yet to be seen whether they will do what they say they will do and how effective that will be overall.”
