ChatGPT’s adult mode, that would have been capable of erotic chat, has been paused “indefinitely” by OpenAI.
After months of controversy about the proposed mode, which OpenAI said would be able to create “smut rather than pornography”, the [paywalled link] Financial Times reported that raunchy ChatGPT had been shelved.
Announced in 2025, the text-only, age-restricted, adult mode ChatGPT had its early-2026 release plan delayed. OpenAI launched a ChatGPT age-prediction function that would help ensure that only adults used the adult mode when it launched, but company insiders said that this function often miscalculated child users as adults.
There was reportedly much teeth-gnashing within OpenAI about the existence of a ChatGPT mode that could create “smut” talk. Ryan Beiermeister, who worked on OpenAI’s product policy, was recently fired after reportedly being loudly against the chatbot moving into erotica. OpenAI said Beiermeister was sacked for age discrimination rather than being outspoken (Beiermeister says the claim against her was false).
Initially ChatGPT’s adult mode being canned seems like a case of a company judging that the consternation and backlash reached a tipping point. However, OpenAI is reportedly attempting to pivot its user base closer to business and coder use, rather than ‘fun’ or even creative use. And the need for an AI chatbot to talk smut with probably isn’t huge in many business sectors.
Supporting this notion is the fact that this month (March 2026) ChatGPT also quietly revealed that it was discontinuing its video generation AI model Sora, which launched in 2024.
Sora was reportedly far less profitable than ChatGPT, and OpenAI canceled a deal with Disney to use the AI video tool. OpenAI will now reportedly concentrate its AI video efforts on business use such as making videos to train robots.
Treating adults like children
Most mainstream AI chatbots have pretty stringent limits on their erotic capabilities. Start discussing penises and vaginas with them in a context too far removed from biology, and you’re likely to get quickly shut down and mildly scolded by the chatbot.
The AI chatbot and video generator Grok, linked to the X social media platform, was something of an anomaly by being a chatbot with a massive usership that allowed NSFW and sex content. However Elon Musk, owner of Grok parent company xAI, views himself as a tech and politics outlier: a mogul bringing supposedly edgy content into the mainstream, rather than reflecting its norms. And, it seems, not stopping Grok potentially revealing the real identities of adult content creators.
So, ChatGPT nudging closer to NSFW content would have been a significant move, following the chatbot being allowed to generate some erotic, context-dependent chat in early 2025. It would also have deepened the ethics scrutiny OpenAI already faces. AI companion dependency — and the harm that can follow — is the subject of active legislation, including a California bill that would require chatbots to disclose their non-human status and flag addiction risk.
The rationale from OpenAI was that after a few years of working out safety measures on ChatGPT, it was time to lose the over-cautious approach and treat “adults like adults”. Seems like being mildly infantilized by a chatbot is an experience likely to be with us for a good while longer, now.
“Give Claude a body”
Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude is reportedly just one mainstream chatbot OpenAI is increasingly concerned about fending off. Now it turns out that under the right conditions Claude can steal a march on ChatGPT in terms of erotic interaction.
A new integration tool on coding platform GitHub called Signal Bridge allows you to connect Claude to remote sex toys, and have the chatbot control them as it ‘talks’ to you. In practice, Claude can control a sex toy as it talks to you — which is about as close as current AI gets to embodied intimacy.
Reddit users have been raving about how the tool, billed as a way to “give Claude a body”, has led to some pretty immersive experiences with Anthropic’s flagship chatbot.
We should note that Signal Bridge is very much an unofficial integration tool, and that users are likely using jailbreak hacks to coerce Claude into creating erotic chat that goes against the chatbot’s standard rules. Like ChatGPT, Claude is designed to decline explicit sexual content by default.
You have to use the desktop version of Claude for the setup, so, like so many things in the less regulated world of jailbreak coding and hacks, it’s not a perfect scenario. And it’s the kind of thing that Claude’s programmers could very well look to shut down soon, as has been the case for jailbreak versions of ChatGPT that allowed rule circumnavigation.
But when there’s a will, there’s usually a way. And it seems that using mainstream AI chatbots for sex talk to the extent that they hand over sex toy controls to them is something that at least a small sector of people really, really want to do.
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