Our commitment to community safety

Mass shootings, threats against public officials, bombing attempts, and attacks on communities and individuals are an unacceptable and grave reality in today’s world. These incidents are a reminder of how real the threat of violence is—and how quickly violent intent can move from words to action.

People may also bring these moments and feelings into ChatGPT. They may ask questions about the news, try to understand what happened, express fear or anger, or talk about violence in ways that are fictional, historical, political, personal, or potentially dangerous. We work to train ChatGPT to recognize the difference—and to draw lines when a conversation starts to move toward threats, potential harm to others, or real-world planning.

We’re sharing what we do to minimize uses of our services in furtherance of violence or other harm: how our models are trained to respond safely, how our systems detect potential risk of harm, and what actions we take when someone violates our policies. We are constantly improving the steps we take to help protect people and communities, guided by input from psychologists, psychiatrists, civil liberties and law enforcement experts, and others who help us navigate difficult decisions around safety, privacy, and democratized access.

We work to train our models to refuse requests for instructions, tactics, or planning that could meaningfully enable violence. At the same time, people may ask neutral questions about violence for factual, historical, educational, or preventive reasons, and we aim to allow those discussions while maintaining clear safety boundaries—for example, by omitting detailed, operational instructions that could facilitate harm. The line between benign and harmful uses can be subtle, so we continually refine our approach and work with experts to help distinguish between safe, bounded responses and actionable steps for carrying out violence or other real-world harm.

Our safety work also extends to situations where users may be in distress ⁠ or at risk of self-harm. In these moments, our goal is to avoid facilitating harmful acts, and also to help de-escalate the situation and guide people to real-world support. ChatGPT surfaces localized crisis resources, encourages people to reach out to mental health professionals or trusted loved ones, and in the most serious cases directs people to seek emergency help.

Where we assess that a case presents indicators of potentially serious, real-world harm, it is escalated for a more in-depth investigation, including assessing the overall level of risk using structured criteria. This stage is reserved for a limited subset of cases and is intended to ensure higher-risk scenarios are assessed with additional context and expertise. When conversations indicate an imminent and credible risk of harm to others, we notify law enforcement. Mental health and behavioral experts help us assess difficult cases and our referral criteria is flexible to account for the fact that a user may not explicitly discuss the target, means, and timing of planned violence in a ChatGPT conversation but that there may still be potential risk of imminent and credible violence.

Last Fall, we introduced Parental Controls ⁠ to help families guide how ChatGPT works in their homes. Parental controls allow parents to link their account with their teen’s account and customize settings for a safe, age-appropriate experience. Parents don’t have access to their teen’s conversations, and in rare cases where our system and trained human reviewers detect possible signs of acute distress, parents may be notified—but only with the information needed to support their teen’s safety. Parents are automatically notified by either email, SMS, push notification, or all three.

Working closely with experts from our Council on Well-Being and AI and our Global Physicians Network, we will also soon be introducing a trusted contact feature, which will allow adult users to designate someone to receive notifications when they may need additional support.

Our Model Spec ⁠ (opens in a new window) lays out our long-standing principles for how we want our models to behave: maximizing helpfulness and user freedom while minimizing the risk of harm through sensible defaults.

As part of this ongoing work, we’ve continued expanding our safeguards to help ChatGPT better recognize subtle signs of risk of harm across different contexts. Some safety risks only become clear over time: a single message may seem harmless on its own, but a broader pattern within a long conversation—or across conversations—can suggest something more concerning. Building on years of work in model training, evaluations and red teaming, and ongoing expert input, we have strengthened how ChatGPT recognizes subtle warning signs across long, high-stakes conversations and carefully responds. We’ll share more about this work in the coming weeks.

We assume the best of our users, but when we detect that someone is attempting to use our tools to potentially plan or carry out violence, we take action, including revoking access to OpenAI’s services. Our Usage Policies ⁠ set clear expectations for acceptable use and that we may prohibit use for threats, intimidation, harassment, terrorism or violence, weapons development, illicit activity, destruction of property or systems, and attempts to circumvent our safeguards. We take those policies seriously and work hard to enforce them.