Earlier this year, Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, teased the possibility of a new NSFW mode for ChatGPT. Now, the mode that would “treat adults like adults” is almost here, with a timeline now in place.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, told reporters during a briefing about GPT-5.2 that adult mode will debut in the first quarter of 2026. Before this time, the company wants to get better at age prediction to best enable the feature.
Currently, OpenAI is in the early stages of testing its age prediction model. This is designed to figure out when to apply certain safeguards and content restrictions for users under 18.
During the briefing, Simo said the company is also testing the model in select countries, gauging its ability to identify teens and not misidentify adults.
What could this feature look like?
OpenAI has been fairly quiet about this feature so far. In the initial announcement, mentioned at the end of an X post from Sam Altman, it said: “In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our 'treat adult users like adults' principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”
We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.Now that we have…October 14, 2025
This would see OpenAI lean even more towards the direction companies like xAI’s Grok are taking.
Currently, there are safeguards in place when using ChatGPT. These stop users from generating adult content, whether that’s via text, image, video or code.
Unlike competitors like Anthropic and Google Gemini, OpenAI has dipped its toes into this world a few times. When Sora 2 first launched, the company allowed users to recreate celebrities and real figures.
Since the early days of ChatGPT, the company has flipped back and forth between giving complete control to its users.
Here, it seems like they are trying for the best of both worlds, giving users the ability to produce adult content but only if they pass age-gating.
What is age gating and how does it work?
Trying to accurately understand a user’s age is challenging, but it is something the team has spoken about recently.
"We’re building an age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT," Altman wrote. "If there is doubt, we’ll play it safe and default to the under-18 experience. In some cases or countries, we may also ask for an ID; we know this is a privacy compromise for adults, but believe it is a worthy tradeoff."
As Fidji Simo said in the recent update, this feature is still being worked on. It could take time to accurately predict ages, and OpenAI will need to get it right to avoid accidentally allowing under-18s access to adult content.
