Why chatbots are starting to check your age

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How do tech companies check if their users are kids?

This question has taken on new urgency recently thanks to growing concern about the dangers that can arise when children talk to AI chatbots. For years Big Tech asked for birthdays (that one could make up) to avoid violating child privacy laws, but they weren’t required to moderate content accordingly. Two developments over the last week show how quickly things are changing in the US and how this issue is becoming a new battleground, even among parents and child-safety advocates.

In one corner is the Republican Party, which has supported laws passed in several states that require sites with adult content to verify users’ ages. Critics say this provides cover to block anything deemed “harmful to minors,” which could include sex education. Other states, like California, are coming after AI companies with laws to protect kids who talk to chatbots (by requiring them to verify who’s a kid). Meanwhile, President Trump is attempting to keep AI regulation a national issue rather than allowing states to make their own rules. Support for various bills in Congress is constantly in flux.

So what might happen? The debate is quickly moving away from whether age verification is necessary and toward who will be responsible for it. This responsibility is a hot potato that no company wants to hold.

In a blog post last Tuesday, OpenAI revealed that it plans to roll out automatic age prediction. In short, the company will apply a model that uses factors like the time of day, among others, to predict whether a person chatting is under 18. For those identified as teens or children, ChatGPT will apply filters to “reduce exposure” to content like graphic violence or sexual role-play. YouTube launched something similar last year. 

If you support age verification but are concerned about privacy, this might sound like a win. But there’s a catch. The system is not perfect, of course, so it could classify a child as an adult or vice versa. People who are wrongly labeled under 18 can verify their identity by submitting a selfie or government ID to a company called Persona. 

Selfie verifications have issues: They fail more often for people of color and those with certain disabilities. Sameer Hinduja, who co-directs the Cyberbullying Research Center, says the fact that Persona will need to hold millions of government IDs and masses of biometric data is another weak point. “When those get breached, we’ve exposed massive populations all at once,” he says. 

Hinduja instead advocates for device-level verification, where a parent specifies a child’s age when setting up the child’s phone for the first time. This information is then kept on the device and shared securely with apps and websites. 

That’s more or less what Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, recently lobbied US lawmakers to call for. Cook was fighting lawmakers who wanted to require app stores to verify ages, which would saddle Apple with lots of liability. 

More signals of where this is all headed will come on Wednesday, when the Federal Trade Commission—the agency that would be responsible for enforcing these new laws—is holding an all-day workshop on age verification. Apple’s head of government affairs, Nick Rossi, will be there. He’ll be joined by higher-ups in child safety at Google and Meta, as well as a company that specializes in marketing to children.

The FTC has become increasingly politicized under President Trump (his firing of the sole Democratic commissioner was struck down by a federal court, a decision that is now pending review by the US Supreme Court). In July, I wrote about signals that the agency is softening its stance toward AI companies. Indeed, in December, the FTC overturned a Biden-era ruling against an AI company that allowed people to flood the internet with fake product reviews, writing that it clashed with President Trump’s AI Action Plan.

Wednesday’s workshop may shed light on how partisan the FTC’s approach to age verification will be. Red states favor laws that require porn websites to verify ages (but critics warn this could be used to block a much wider range of content). Bethany Soye, a Republican state representative who is leading an effort to pass such a bill in her state of South Dakota, is scheduled to speak at the FTC meeting. The ACLU generally opposes laws requiring IDs to visit websites and has instead advocated for an expansion of existing parental controls.

While all this gets debated, though, AI has set the world of child safety on fire. We’re dealing with increased generation of child sexual abuse material, concerns (and lawsuits) about suicides and self-harm following chatbot conversations, and troubling evidence of kids’ forming attachments to AI companions. Colliding stances on privacy, politics, free expression, and surveillance will complicate any effort to find a solution. Write to me with your thoughts.