American AI company OpenAI has announced parental controls for ChatGPT. This feature, which will be available next month, will allow parents to link their personal ChatGPT accounts to their children’s accounts.

ChatGPT launches parental controls

The new controls announced allow parents to manage the responses their children receive from ChatGPT. They also offer the option to disable certain features, such as memory and chat history.

OpenAI announced that this feature will generate automatic alerts when it detects a teen experiencing severe distress. According to the company, this feature was developed using expert insights to foster trust between parents and teens. The company says it will collaborate with experts in topics such as eating disorders, substance use, and adolescent health to make its models safer for sensitive topics.

As part of its safety efforts, a new real-time navigator will be added to ChatGPT. This new system will guide challenging conversations through reasoning models. OpenAI states that models trained with this method apply safety guidelines more consistently and are more resilient to hostile alerts.

In the future, when ChatGPT detects that a person is in distress, it will guide that conversation through a reasoning model, regardless of which model the user initially selected.

OpenAI announced that users can expect more safety features within the next 120 days. These efforts will continue beyond that timeframe, with as many new features as possible rolling out this year.

The parental controls announcement comes after the first wrongful death lawsuit filed against OpenAI. In the lawsuit filed last week, the family of a teenager who committed suicide alleges that ChatGPT facilitated their son’s suicide plan despite being aware of his four failed suicide attempts.