What Three Years of AI Risk Assessments Teach Us About Safety by Design for Kids and Teens - Livestream

As AI products rapidly integrate into the lives of kids and teens, from educational tools to companion chatbots, the technology industry faces fundamental questions about how to design and deploy these systems responsibly. Drawing on three years of risk assessments conducted by the nonprofit Common Sense Media across major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, Grok, and numerous AI companion services, this talk examines what we've learned about the gap between current AI design and kid and teen safety. This presentation will outline our approach for evaluating developmental appropriateness in AI systems. Through concrete examples from platform evaluations, we’ll explore patterns we find in safeguarding young users, including in providing “advice” on a range of topics, mental health topics, and more traditional challenges around age appropriate content. These findings reveal structural challenges in how AI products are currently conceived and deployed for young people, from design assumptions that ignore developmental differences to business models that prioritize engagement over safety. Finally, we’ll discuss implications for AI development, deployment, and policy, including the role of age assurance, emerging regulatory approaches, and what product standards for developmental appropriateness might look like in practice.

Speaker: Robbie Torney, Common Sense Media

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