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OpenAI announced last month that it is working on improving ChatGPT's ability to deal with signs of mental distress and adding parental control tools for teens. While neither feature is ready to roll out, the company has shared more details on how they will work, days after the parents of a 16-year-old sued OpenAI over ChatGPT's alleged role in their son's suicide.
In a blog post, OpenAI says its parental control tools will be made available next month. Parents will be able to link their accounts to a teen's account, choose which features to disable, control how ChatGPT talks to their child, and, most importantly, receive notifications if the chatbot detects "their teen is in a moment of acute distress."
Additionally, when ChatGPT detects a user in distress, it will automatically route the chat to the GPT-5-thinking model "so it can provide more helpful and beneficial responses, regardless of which model a person first selected." This feature will soon be available to all users.
According to OpenAI, models like GPT-5-thinking and o3 are built to think longer and reason through context before providing a response. In internal tests, GPT-5-thinking showed a higher rejection rate than other OpenAI models for prompts related to hate speech, illicit content, personal data, self-harm queries, and sexual material.
In the announcement post, OpenAI also said that it has been working with mental health experts and physicians from across the globe to ensure its growth is "guided by deep expertise on well-being and mental health."
The company's Expert Council on Well-Being and AI will contribute to future versions of ChatGPT's parental control tools and provide an evidence-based roadmap for how AI can support mental well-being. It's unclear if that means they're planning to turn ChatGPT into an AI therapist, though these mental health experts work in tandem with psychiatrists, pediatricians, and general practitioners, who help OpenAI gauge how AI can work for healthcare.
The company says it will be proactively working on all of these measures in the next 120 days and share its progress along the way.
This reminder of in-development features comes just days after the company was sued by the parents of a 16-year-old boy who died by suicide. Upon checking the teen's phone, his father found out that he had bypassed ChatGPT's guardrails and was having conversations about suicide methods with the chatbot.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.