LOS ANGELES—Billionaire and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban has criticized Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, for announcing that ChatGPT will soon allow "erotica for verified adults."
"This is going to backfire," Cuban posted to X on Tuesday. "Hard. No parent is going to trust that their kids can’t get through your age gating.
"They will just push their kids to every other LLM. Why take the risk? Same for schools. Why take the risk? A few seniors in [high school] are 18 and decide it would be fun to show the hardcore erotica they created to the 14-year-olds. What could go wrong?"
Altman defended his company's decision, notes CNBC. In a Wednesday post on X, Altman asserted that OpenAI is not a regulator of morality.
"Without being paternalistic, we will attempt to help users achieve their long-term goals," Altman said. "But we are not the elected moral police of the world.
"In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here," he added.
Cuban is referring to Altman's announcement that ChatGPT could potentially be used for mass AI-generated pornography production.
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.
A spokesperson for OpenAI told U.S. public broadcaster NPR in May 2025 that the company was working to "responsibly" permit AI-generated porn 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."
