Advancing youth safety and wellbeing in EMEA
OpenAI has introduced the European Youth Safety Blueprint alongside the initial 12 recipients of its EMEA Youth & Wellbeing Grants. The initiatives aim to promote safe, age-appropriate, and responsible AI adoption for teens, families, and educators across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
The Core Development
Today, we are introducing our European Youth Safety Blueprint and the first recipients of our EMEA Youth & Wellbeing Grant. Both are part of our ongoing effort to help ensure young people can benefit from AI in ways that are age-appropriate and support their development and wellbeing.
To ensure young people can fully benefit from AI, Europe needs an approach that is practical, evidence-led, and focused on how young people actually use AI. We are publishing our European Youth Safety Blueprint, which sets out five pillars for policymakers who want to strengthen protections for young people in the age of AI while preserving access to tools that support learning, creativity, and opportunity.
The Blueprint focuses on practical measures including responsible AI adoption in education, age-appropriate experiences supported by safeguards and privacy-preserving age assurance, under-18 safety policies to identify and mitigate risks, protections against manipulative or deceptive AI outputs, and common standards for accessible parental controls.
Deployment & Availability
Advancing youth safety will take more than just policy recommendations. We will also support organisations working directly with young people, families, educators, and communities to better understand what safe and beneficial AI use looks like in practice.
We are excited to announce 12 recipients of our EMEA Youth & Wellbeing Grant . Launched in January , the program totalling €500,000 is intended to support NGOs and research organizations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa working on youth safety, wellbeing, and AI.
The chosen recipients are conducting practical work and independent research that will help define what safe, responsible AI looks like in the real world. This grant funding will support a range of projects, including critical youth wellbeing services, mental health support, improved AI literacy, age assurance research, and frontline resources for parents, educators, youth workers, and young people, including those in vulnerable communities.
Strategic Perspective & Ecosystem Impact
These are not the only answers, but we hope they are a useful contribution to ongoing efforts of getting this right.
Centre for Information Policy Leadership: supporting research on AI-driven age estimation within broader age-assurance systems.
e-Enfance (FR): delivering youth wellbeing and digital literacy projects and training.
Why it matters
The initiative highlights growing industry focus on regulatory compliance and practical safety measures for young users, addressing both policy frameworks and grassroots research.