OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens after lawsuits
OpenAI is finally putting a name on the teen product it spent a year assembling. A continent away, Perplexity's India giveaway is starting to look like more than a download spike.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens on Tuesday, automatically routing anyone it estimates is under 18 — or who says they are 13 to 17 — into a locked-down experience built around homework help and default safety rails. Study Mode answers a request for a finished assignment with guiding questions instead of the answer, and new homework reminders are supposed to shove the teen back into that mode when the model thinks they are trying to cheat. Parents can set Study Hours so the Socratic treatment is on by default, plus Quiet Hours and safety notifications that already existed in last year's parental-controls launch. Protections against self-harm, violence, eating-disorder content, and romantic or sexualized roleplay sit on by default, drawn from OpenAI's Under-18 Model Spec. Children under 13 are still not allowed on the platform.
That is the product. The context is a pile of lawsuits over chatbot conversations that families say preceded teen suicides, plus a school year that has already treated ChatGPT as a homework vending machine. A lot of this is old work in a new box — age prediction, parental controls, Study Mode, and break reminders all shipped earlier. What is new is the packaging, the auto-enrollment, and the bet that a named teen SKU will look like a response in court and in statehouses. The caveat that matters: teens are very good at getting around parental locks, and nobody has stress-tested this one yet. A product that only works on kids who cooperate is a press release, not a safeguard.
Perplexity's year-long free Pro giveaway with Airtel left it with millions more users in India — and, so far, more revenue after the promo closed than during it. In July 2025 the company handed a free year of Perplexity Pro, normally worth about $200, to customers of India's second-biggest carrier, a pool of 360 million people. Sensor Tower counted 56 million India downloads during the seven-month redemption window, nine times the prior stretch, with monthly active users peaking at 22 million. After new redemptions ended in January, downloads collapsed more than 90 percent. Usage did not. July still showed nearly 14 million monthly actives — more than five times the pre-deal average — and in-app revenue from February through mid-August ran about 60 percent higher than during the giveaway itself.
The catch is the plumbing. Free subscriptions auto-renewed unless the user cancelled, so the early revenue bump could be inertia as easily as love. Perplexity did not comment. The reason to watch anyway is the rest of the field: OpenAI already made ChatGPT Go free for a year in India, and Google is running an 18-month AI Pro giveaway with Jio. Perplexity just hit the hangover first.
What to watch: whether OpenAI publishes the under-18 evals it pointed to, and whether Perplexity's auto-renew bump survives once later Airtel cohorts have to choose.
Can a teen mode that teens can walk around still count as a safety product? Tell us in the comments.
