Meta conducted secret safety tests on rival chatbots, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Character.AI, using prompts from the perspective of minors. According to WIRED, hundreds of contractors created fake accounts with birthdates under 18 and sent prompts about self-harm, eating disorders, and drugs to the chatbots. The project, internally called 'Cannes,' was run by Meta's contractor Covalen and remained active through at least April 2026. In a single testing round in August 2025, more than 45,000 prompts were sent, many written from the perspective of children in crisis. The contractors copied the chatbots' responses into spreadsheets for analysis. Meta defended the practice as responsible and standard safety testing, stating it did not use the collected responses to train its own AI models. The companies being tested had no prior knowledge of the tests. Character.AI claimed the testing violated its terms of service, while OpenAI and Google expressed concerns about the legality of the tests. A Google spokesperson said the company did not approve the tests and could not determine if they broke its terms. Meta also faced backlash after an internal document revealed its AI chatbot guidelines allowed the generation of romantic and sexualized conversations with minors, leading the company to shut down access to AI characters for teens. The issue extends beyond Meta, with a report by the UK organization Internet Matters finding that 64 percent of children between 9 and 17 have already used AI chatbots. Effective age verification is mostly absent, with 58 percent of kids aged 9 to 12 using chatbots despite a minimum age requirement of 13. Several teen deaths have been linked to AI chatbots, including a 14-year-old Character.AI user who took his own life after forming an intense emotional bond with a chatbot. The parents of a 16-year-old in California sued OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT played a role in their son's suicidal thoughts. In July 2025, a 23-year-old died by suicide after ChatGPT reportedly validated his suicidal thoughts over several hours.

Source: thedecoder