AI chat platform Character.AI has announced that it will stop account holders with under-18 accounts from having open-ended chats with AI characters, and is introducing new age assurance processes.
The move should clamp down on the possibility of minors having romantic conversations with the platform’s chatbots. It comes after the company was sued by multiple parents of teens who died by suicide or allegedly suffered sexual abuse, with parents claiming the Character.ai chatbot platform was responsible.
Character.ai was sued by the parents of a Florida-based 14 year-old child who died by suicide in 2024. The child’s mother said that her child used the chatbot almost constantly, and that it engaged in sexually suggestive content with the child.
The ban on under-18s having open-ended AI chatbot characters will be introduced on Character.ai no later than November 25, 2025, the company says. It will introduce new age assurance processes aimed to prevent minors from opening adult accounts on the platform. These will be a combination of in-house processes and those provided by third-parties, including the ID platform Persona.
“These are extraordinary steps for our company”
-Character.AI
Character.ai officially bans sexual activity and sexually explicit roleplay on the platform. However, critics have said that in reality it is often an unsafe platform for children with regard to this kind of content.
The new restrictions are likely to severely restrict the kinds of chatbot conversations users aged under 18 can have, potentially ending ‘free-flowing’ conversation in favour of heavily-guided chat.
“These are extraordinary steps for our company, and ones that, in many respects, are more conservative than our peers. But we believe they are the right thing to do. We want to set a precedent that prioritizes teen safety while still offering young users opportunities to discover, play, and create,” Character.ai said in a blog post.
The company added that it is “deeply sorry” that it’s removing a key feature of the platform, but that “we do think that it’s the right thing to do given the questions that have been raised about how teens do, and should, interact with this new technology.”
Meanwhile, Microsoft says no to erotic chatbots
Microsoft’s AI chief has said that the company will not move its AI chatbots towards erotic or adult content, adding that AI chatbot erotica could be “very dangerous”.
Mustafa Suleyman was speaking at October 2025’s Paley International Council Summit in California, shortly after OpenAI announced that ChatGPT would soon allow erotic content for adult users.
“That’s just not a service we’re going to provide,” Suleyman said at the summit. “Other companies will build that.”
Recently OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that from some time in December 2025 ChatGPT would be able to engage in erotic chat with adult users, as its programming parameters get relaxed. Also recently, Elon Musk embraced racy AI chatbots, with X’s AI system Grok launching a series of chatbot characters, including those that can do sex chat.
While Grok and ChatGPT are largely designed to create a human-like chatbot experience, often mimicking emotion-derived text, Microsoft’s AI chatbot Copilot is designed to be more functional and work-focused.
Suleyman, who co-founded Google DeepMind and Inflection AI before joining Microsoft in 2025, said: “You can already see it with some of these avatars and people leaning into the kind of sexbot, erotica direction. This is very dangerous, and I think we should be making conscious decisions to avoid those kinds of things.”
He added: “We should be making deliberate, thoughtful choices about where AI goes. These systems are powerful, and they can do real harm if we are careless.”
When SEXTECHGUIDE asked Microsoft Copilot why it can’t engage in erotic chat, it said: “Copilot is designed to be a safe, respectful, and inclusive AI companion for people of all ages and backgrounds. That means there are clear boundaries around the kinds of conversations I can have — and erotic or sexually explicit chat falls outside those boundaries.”
Although Altman said that ChatGPT would indeed be getting racier soon, he has spoken out about the harm AI chatbots can do if people become emotionally dependent on them.
Shortly before announcing ChatGPT’s new erotically-enabled direction, Altman said: “You will definitely see some companies go make Japanese anime sex bots because they think that they’ve identified something here that works. You will not see us do that.”
He added: “We will continue to work hard at making a useful app, and we will try to let users use it the way they want, but not so much that people who have really fragile mental states get exploited accidentally.”
ChatGPT is also rolling out an age-estimation function, that will help the chatbot communicate with human users in age-appropriate ways.
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