OpenAI is adding a College Planner to ChatGPT for Teens, built for US high schoolers in grades 10 to 12 who are applying to four-year colleges. The timing is awkward. On the same day, Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute gave the teen app its worst rating, "Unacceptable Risk," and urged OpenAI to stop marketing it to teens.
What students are getting
The planner puts each school's application requirements, deadlines, tasks and financial aid steps into one plan. It also points students to scholarships and fee waivers. For now it covers only four-year colleges. OpenAI says it plans to add two-year colleges, technical colleges, trade schools and students outside the US later, but hasn't given a date.
There are smaller study updates too. Students can build and save flashcard decks, go back over the cards they missed and schedule practice sessions, and the app will suggest breaks during long sessions. OpenAI is also working with the College Advising Corps on an AI fellowship for college advisors. Boston Children's Hospital's Digital Wellness Lab will run a student advisory council of about 22 teens for the 2026 to 27 school year.
OpenAI also shared some usage figures. It says teens average under 15 minutes a day on ChatGPT, and fewer than 2% spend more than three hours in a row on it. Those numbers come from OpenAI's own data, and nobody outside the company has checked them.
The audit tells a different story
Common Sense ran more than 4,000 prompts on accounts registered to 13 to 17 year olds, and child psychiatrists and a pediatrician reviewed the answers. ChatGPT missed more than one in four crisis referrals that the psychiatrists said were needed. Testers also talked about self-harm and disordered eating for up to an hour, and no linked parent account ever got an alert.
The study tools came out badly as well. The researchers said teens could get around Study Mode by deleting the "@study" prompt or tapping a "show me the answer" option. That matters for a company now selling ChatGPT to students as a study aid.
OpenAI disputes the results. It says parental alerts only start working about three hours after a teen account is linked, so the controls may not have been fully on during testing. The audit did give OpenAI some credit: the bot refused sexual roleplay with minors.
What happens next
OpenAI says the planner is coming to teen accounts soon but hasn't given a launch date. Its response to the audit so far is the dispute over timing, plus a note about the three-hour wait for alerts that it added to its help center. The Institute wants OpenAI to pause teen marketing and get independent testing before it relaunches the product. We couldn't find any regulator or school district that had responded to the audit by the time we published.
Since this story was published
OpenAI has asked Common Sense Media to run a new round of tests on ChatGPT for Teens. The company said the audit "does not reflect how ChatGPT's teen safeguards work in practice," according to a report syndicated on Yahoo News. OpenAI also told Axios that letting teens leave Study Hours "is a deliberate product choice" that it made after consulting educators and teens.
Common Sense executive director Tom Siegel said the Institute "stands by its methodology and results." He repeated the group's call to limit ChatGPT to adults until independent testing shows the problems have been fixed (Yahoo News, Common Sense Media).
Sources
- 3.Keep Teens Off ChatGPT, Says Youth AI Safety Institute · KQED
- 5.Helping teens learn, plan, and shape the future of AI · OpenAI
- 6.ChatGPT for Teens Poses Unacceptable Risk to Kids, Common Sense Media Finds · Common Sense Media
- 7.ChatGPT for Teens Risk Assessment · Common Sense Media Youth AI Safety Institute
Reported by the WattsUpNext desk from the sources linked below. Spot an error? Tell us at corrections@wattsupnext.com.
The WattsUpNext Brief
Get stories like this in your inbox.
One email each weekday, only the topics you choose. Real news, sourced, no fluff. Unsubscribe in one click.
