Big Tech has been preoccupied lately with society’s largest—nay, only—problem: teenagers watching videos intended for adults, and YouTube is the latest to adopt a high-tech approach to age verification on its platform.
Unlike traditional age verification, which simply asks you to input your birthdate and relies on the honor system, YouTube’s new system won’t require any input from you at all. It will assemble cues from your YouTube usage to form an estimate of your age.
“Over the next few weeks, we’ll begin to roll out machine learning to a small set of users in the US to estimate their age, so that teens are treated as teens and adults as adults,” YouTube wrote in a July 29, 2025, blog entry on its website. The new method, as reported by 9to5Google, is set to begin rolling out on August 13.
So, what happens if YouTube’s AI algorithm makes a wrong guess?
An educated guessing game?
“We will use AI to interpret a variety of signals that help us to determine whether a user is over or under 18,” said YouTube. “These signals include the types of videos a user is searching for, the categories of videos they have watched, or the longevity of the account.”
When the algorithm decides the user isn’t an adult, it’ll turn off personalized advertising (not a bad move), add certain safeguards to recommendations (such as limiting repetitive watching of certain kinds of videos), and turn on “digital wellbeing tools,” which include such things as “take a break” reminders and a running count of time spent watching YouTube videos.
If you get pegged as being under 18 but are most certainly 18 or over, you’ll have the chance to use a credit card or government ID to verify your age. How long it’ll take, YouTube doesn’t say.
YouTube emphasized that the new age verification is being introduced to “a small set of users in the US” before rolling it out more widely to the user base. “We’ve used this approach in other markets for some time, where it is working well,” YouTube added, although it doesn’t elaborate on which markets or what their definition of “working well” constitutes.
Is it invasive? I think so. Once upon a time, we used technology. Now, it seems like the reverse grows more true every day.
The post YouTube’s Gonna Start Using AI To Guess Your Age Next Week appeared first on VICE.
