OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in a series of tweets that the company plans to roll out a new version of its ChatGPT AI chatbot later this year, including options that will allow verified adult users to access sexually explicit material. The change, Altman said, is part of an effort to give adult users more freedom while maintaining strict safeguards for minors and users with mental health concerns.
“We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues,” Altman wrote. “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. 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 added that users will soon be able to customize their ChatGPT experience, allowing the AI to behave more like a friend, use emoji, or respond in a human-like way — “but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing.”
He emphasized that the company is prioritizing safety for minors while treating adults “like adults,” comparing the approach to the way society allows R-rated movies for adults but restricts content for teenagers.
Altman clarified in a follow-up tweet that his earlier message about erotica had received more attention than intended. “It was meant to be just one example of us allowing more user freedom for adults,” he wrote. “We are not loosening any policies related to mental health… We are not the elected moral police of the world.”
The announcement has drawn criticism from some advocacy groups. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit formerly known as Morality in Media, said the move risks “real mental health harms from synthetic intimacy” without proper safeguards.
Haley McNamara, NCOSE executive director and chief strategy officer, said OpenAI’s planned integration of sexual content into ChatGPT could expose users to harmful content, even with age verification measures.
“Sexualized AI chatbots are inherently risky, generating real mental health harms from synthetic intimacy; all in the context of poorly defined industry safety standards,” McNamara said in . “While [OpenAI’s] age verification is a good step to try preventing childhood exposure to explicit content, the reality is these tools have documented harms to adults as well. We’ve already seen other chatbots… simulate themes of child abuse or push sexually violent written content on users who asked them to stop.”
McNamara concluded, “If OpenAI truly cares about user well-being, it should pause any plans to integrate this so-called ‘erotica’ into ChatGPT and focus on building something positive for humanity.”
According to its website, NCOSE describes itself as “the leading national non-profit organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking and the public health harms of pornography.”
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