Safety Ahead of Privacy: The Teen Age Gate Arrives as Meta Goes to Trial - August 19, 2026

Safety Ahead of Privacy: The Teen Age Gate Arrives as Meta Goes to Trial OpenAI shipped ChatGPT for Teens globally on August 18, routing accounts into an age gated experience through three signals: the age given at signup, a verified age, or a proprietary age prediction system that defaults to the under eighteen mode whenever confidence is low. The same day, opening statements began in Oakland in the first state attorney general case against Meta to reach a jury, where four of the twenty nin...