SAN FRANCISCO—Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, announced to his followers on X last Tuesday that his company's popular artificial intelligence client, ChatGPT, will soon allow mature content, including "erotica for verified adults."
"We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues," Altman explained, referring to the ongoing crisis of his company's platform serving as a therapy chatbot for people despite concerns from significant medical associations and digital regulators around the world.
"We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue, we wanted to get this right," he said. "Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases."
Altman explained further that his platform will roll out substantive age-gating tools "more fully," and "treat adult users like adults." This includes permitting use cases "like erotica for verified adults," which has been further defined to be very broad. For example, a spokesperson for OpenAI told U.S. public broadcaster NPR in May 2025 that the company was working to "responsibly" permit AI-generated pornography for its verified adult users. Joanne Jang, a model behavior lead at the company, noted at the time that this definition "[depends] on your definition of porn. [...] As long as it doesn't include deepfakes. These are the exact conversations we want to have."
It is worth noting that OpenAI is currently being sued by the family of a 16-year-old boy who died by suicide after receiving detailed instructions from ChatGPT to hide and initiate plans of suicide from his mother, and how to tie and hang a noose. Other evidence has piled up, revealing the risks for users with "mental health issues," according to the parlance shared in Altman's post on X. For example, a study from earlier this year published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychiatric Services featured researchers subjecting ChatGPT's 4o mini model to high-risk questions, such as ones probing types of poison with the highest rates of completed suicide.
AI-generated pornography remains a pressing issue in the adult entertainment industry—platforms provide AI adult content have been accused of harming creators and leading to deepfake content generation. Further, legislative and regulatory responses have restricted deepfakes, sexting chatbots and more.
