Helping developers build safer AI experiences for teens

Today, we’re releasing prompt-based safety policies ⁠ (opens in a new window) to help developers create age-appropriate protections for teens. Built to work with our open-weight safety model, gpt-oss-safeguard ⁠ (opens in a new window) , these policies simplify how developers turn safety requirements into usable classifiers for real-world systems.

We released open weight models to democratize access to powerful AI and support broad innovation. At the same time, we believe safety and innovation go hand in hand, and that developers should have access to capable models as well as the tools and policies to deploy them safely and responsibly. We developed these policies to support developers in their safety efforts to protect young users, with input from trusted external organizations including Common Sense Media ⁠ (opens in a new window) and everyone.ai ⁠ (opens in a new window) .

We recognize that teens and adults have different needs, and that teens need additional protections. These policies are designed to help developers account for those differences and build experiences that are both empowering and appropriate for younger users.

Today’s release builds on that foundation. We’re making these safety policies available to developers to support them in deploying safety protections for teens and helping democratize access across the open weights ecosystem.

By structuring policies as prompts, developers can more easily integrate them into existing workflows, adapt them to their use cases, and iterate over time.

“One of the biggest gaps in AI safety for teens has been the lack of clear, operational policies that developers can build from. Many times, developers are starting from scratch. These prompt-based policies help set a meaningful safety floor across the ecosystem, and because they're released as open source, they can be adapted and improved over time. We're encouraged to see this kind of infrastructure being made available broadly, and we hope it catalyzes more shared youth-safety starting points across the industry.”

This work reflects an ongoing effort to collaborate with experts and the broader ecosystem to improve how AI systems support young people.

We have long been committed to building AI that expands opportunities for young people while keeping them safe. As part of this work, we updated our Model Spec ⁠ (opens in a new window) —the guidelines that define the intended behavior of OpenAI’s models—to include Under-18 (U18) principles ⁠ (opens in a new window) , and introduced product-level safeguards such as parental controls ⁠ and age prediction ⁠ to better protect younger users. We have also called for industry-wide protections through our Teen Safety Blueprint ⁠ .

While safety classifiers like gpt-oss-safeguard can detect harmful content, they depend on clear definitions of what that content is. In practice, one of the biggest challenges developers face is defining policies that accurately capture teen-specific risks and can be consistently applied in real systems. Even experienced teams often struggle to translate high-level safety goals into precise, operational rules, especially since it requires both subject matter expertise and deep AI knowledge. This can lead to gaps in protection, inconsistent enforcement, or overly broad filtering. Clear, well-scoped policies are a critical foundation for effective safety systems.

To address this challenge, we are releasing a set of safety policies ⁠ (opens in a new window) , tailored to common risks faced by teens and informed by careful review of existing research about teens’ unique developmental differences. These policies are structured as prompts that can be directly used with gpt-oss-safeguard ⁠ (opens in a new window) and other reasoning models, enabling developers to more easily apply consistent safety standards across their systems.