ChatGPT Now Guesses Your Age — and Restricts You by Default if It Thinks You're Under 18

Open ChatGPT this week and, without any announcement in the chat window, it may already have formed an opinion about how old you are. From 18 August, OpenAI began rolling out “age prediction” on its consumer plans: a system that guesses whether your account belongs to someone under 18 and, if it decides you’re a minor, quietly switches you into a restricted version called ChatGPT for Teens. You are not asked. If the guess lands on “teenager,” the guardrails go up by default. Answer first, because the mechanism matters more than the alarm: the guess is behavioural, and it is admittedly imperfect. By OpenAI’s own account the system reads “general topics you talk about, the times of day you use ChatGPT, how and when your account is used, and how long your account has existed.” And the way to make it stop guessing is not a toggle. It is to prove your age to a third-party verifier called Persona, with a live selfie, a government ID, or both. The choice on offer isn’t whether to be identified. It’s how. None of this arrives from nowhere, and we’ll be fair about why in a moment. But a change that infers a protected characteristic from the content of your conversations, applies real restrictions on the strength of a guess, and offers identity verification as the only exit is worth reading slowly — especially for the adults who will be misclassified, because OpenAI says plainly that some will be. What OpenAI actually switched on The launch has two parts. The visible one is ChatGPT for Teens , announced on 18 August: a version with study-focused features and stronger safety defaults for under-18s. The consequential one is age prediction , the system that decides who gets dropped into it. In OpenAI’s words, “If our system estimates someone is under 18 or they state their age is between 13 and 17, they are automatically placed into ChatGPT for Teens.” It is rolling out globally, with the EU following “in the coming weeks” to fit regional rules. What does the teen experience act