OpenAI will soon relax some of ChatGPT's safety restrictions, allowing users to make the chatbot's responses friendlier or more "human-like", and for "verified adults" to engage in erotic conversations, Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman announced on Tuesday.
In a post on X, he said ChatGPT was "pretty restrictive" to deal with mental health issues, which made the platform less useful and enjoyable to many users without such problems.
"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," he said.
We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. 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.
October 14, 2025
Now that we have…The company now plans to release a new version of ChatGPT that allows users to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about the GPT-4o model.
The announcement is a notable pivot from OpenAI's months-long effort to address the concerning relationships that some mentally unstable users have developed with ChatGPT. Several concerning stories emerged recently around ChatGPT, specifically its GPT-4o model, suggesting the AI chatbot could lead vulnerable users down delusional rabbit holes, as per a TechCrunch report.
"If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing)," Sam Altman said.
"In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our "treat adult users like adults" principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults," the OpenAI CEO said.
It is unclear whether the platform will extend erotica to its AI voice, image, and video generation tools.
OpenAI launched GPT-5 in August, a new AI model that exhibits lower rates of sycophancy and features a router that can identify concerning user behavior. A month later, OpenAI launched safety features for minors, including an age prediction system and a way for parents to control their teen's ChatGPT account.
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