This article was updated with Lead Counsel’s comments in the Raine family’s illegal death lawsuit against Openai.
Openai said Tuesday it plans to route conversations that are sensitive to inference models such as GPT-5 and deploy parental controls within the next month.
The new guardrail comes in the aftermath of teenager Adam Lane’s suicide. Adam Lane discusses self-harm and plans to end his life with ChatGpt. Raine’s parents filed an illegal death lawsuit against Openai.
In a blog post last week, Openai acknowledged the drawbacks of the safety system, including the inability to maintain guardrails during extended conversations. Experts attribute these issues to basic design elements. Rather than redirecting trends in the model to validate user statements and potentially harmful discussions, chatbots will follow conversation threads.
That trend appears to be extreme in the case of Stein-Erik Soelberg, who was reported to be a murderous suicide by the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. Having a history of mental illness, Soelberg used ChatGpt to examine and inspire his delusions of being targeted by epic plots. His delusions have advanced so badly that he killed his mother and himself last month.
Openai believes that at least one solution for off-rail conversations is to automatically reroute sensitive chats with the “inference” model.
“We recently introduced a real-time router that allows you to choose between efficient chat and inference models based on the context of your conversation,” Openai wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Our system begins to route some sensitive conversations to inference models like GPT‑5 thoughts, such as when the system detects signs of acute distress. So, regardless of the model we chose at first, we can provide a more useful and beneficial response.”
Openai says that the GPT-5 thinking and O3 model are built to spend more time thinking and reasoning through context before answering.
The AI company also said it will roll out parental controls next month, allowing parents to link accounts to teenage accounts through email invitations. In late July, Openai unfolded learning modes in ChatGpt to help students maintain their critical thinking skills while studying, rather than tapping ChatGpt to write essays. Soon, parents will have control over how CHATGPT responds to their children with “by default age-appropriate model behavior rules.”
Parents can also disable features such as memory and chat history. Experts say it can lead to delusional thoughts and other problematic behaviors, such as problems with dependence and attachment, reinforcing harmful thought patterns, and fantasies of thought reading. In the case of Adam Raine, ChatGpt provided a way to commit suicide, which reflects his knowledge of his hobby, according to the New York Times.
Perhaps the most important parental control Openai is trying to unfold is that parents can receive notifications when the system detecting teenagers is in a “acute distress” moment.
TechCrunch asked OpenAI for more information on how the company can flag acute distress moments in real time, how long there is a “age-assisted model behavioral rule” by default, and whether parents can implement time limits for teenage use in ChatGPT.
Openai has already rolled out in-app reminders during long sessions to encourage all users to rest, but has stopped using ChatGpt to cut off people who may be using spirals.
The AI company says these safeguards are part of a “120-day initiative” that previews plans for improvements Openai hopes to launch this year. The company also said it is partnering with experts, including expertise in areas such as eating disorders, substance use, and adolescent health, through its global network of physicians and council of happiness and AI experts, to help “set happiness, prioritize, prioritize and design future protections.”
TechCrunch asked how many mental health professionals were involved in the initiative and what suggestions the mental health experts leading the Council of Experts and mental health experts made regarding product, research and policy decisions.
Jay Edelson, the lead lawyer in the Raine family’s illegal death lawsuit against Openai, said the company’s response to ChatGpt’s ongoing safety risks was “inadequate.”
“Openai does not need a panel of experts to determine that the ChatGpt 4o is dangerous,” Edelson said in a statement shared with TechCrunch. “They knew the day they launched their products, and they know that today. Sam Altman shouldn’t hide behind the company’s PR team. Sam should say he believes that chats are safe or he’ll immediately pull out of the market.”
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