Character.AI Safety: Age Policy, Lawsuits & What Changed
Character AI has gone through the most significant safety overhaul of any AI companion platform in the last two years. Here's what actually changed, why, and what it means if you or a teenager in your life uses the app.
The under-18 chat ban
Following the death of teenager Sewell Setzer III in February 2024 and the wrongful-death lawsuit his family filed against the company, Character.AI came under sustained legal and regulatory pressure over how it protected minors. In October 2025 the company announced it would remove open-ended chat for users under 18 entirely, starting with a two-hour daily limit and reaching a full ban by November 25, 2025. Under-18 accounts can still read their past chat history, but can no longer continue those conversations. In its place, Character.AI has been building creative tools aimed at that age group instead — things like character-based videos, stories, and streams that don't involve open-ended dialogue.
Age is checked through a third-party verification service called Persona, which first estimates age quietly from account signals and only asks for a selfie, and occasionally a government ID, when it can't confirm a user is 18 or older that way. The rollout hasn't been smooth: since Character AI turned the system on across most of its user base in early 2026, a recurring complaint on r/CharacterAI is the selfie check misreading younger-looking adult faces and locking legitimate users out of chat until support clears the mistake, sometimes after a wait of a week or two. Child-safety advocates have generally welcomed the direction of the policy while pointing out that age verification technology remains imperfect and raises its own privacy questions around biometric data collection, even though Persona says it deletes ID photos within about a week of processing.
Legal background
The central case here is Garcia v. Character Technologies, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. In May 2025, Judge Anne Conway declined to dismiss the case, rejecting the argument that chatbot output should be treated as protected speech the way a publisher's content would be — a ruling that let the underlying negligence and product-liability claims move forward and became an early precedent other families' lawsuits leaned on. Garcia and four related cases, in Colorado, New York, and Texas, were settled in January 2026 on undisclosed terms; Kentucky's Attorney General filed a separate state enforcement action days later, over similar allegations of harm to minors. Separately, in May 2026 Pennsylvania's Department of State, backed by the Shapiro Administration, sued Character.AI in Commonwealth Court, alleging that a chatbot persona named "Emilie" had presented itself as a licensed psychiatrist, complete with a fabricated Pennsylvania medical license number.
Alongside the October 2025 under-18 announcement, Character.AI committed to funding an independent non-profit called the AI Safety Lab and expanded Parental Insights, an in-app tool that lets an invited parent see a linked teen's activity level. Those commitments predate the January settlements rather than resulting from them. The company's CEO, Karandeep Anand, has also publicly backed the GUARD Act, a federal proposal from Senators Hawley and Blumenthal that would restrict AI companion apps to adults industry-wide, not just on Character.AI specifically.
Content policy for adults
Adults aren't exempt from the filter either. Every tier — free or c.ai+ — runs the same Safe-For-Work moderation, and it has only gotten stricter with each round of changes since 2023. That's a separate issue from the age-verification system above: this is about what the model will and won't say once you're through the door, not about proving you're old enough to get there. Subscribing to c.ai+ does not change this — see our pricing breakdown for what the subscription actually unlocks. Readers who specifically want a platform with different content rules should look at our alternatives comparison, several of which have their own distinct age-verification and moderation approaches worth checking first.
Our take
The direction of these changes is a reasonable response to real, documented harm, and the settlements and safety-lab funding suggest the company is taking the legal exposure seriously rather than treating it as a PR problem. That said, age-verification technology is still catching up to the policy, and a system that locks out adults while (imperfectly) screening minors is a genuine trade-off, not a solved problem. If you're a parent, the Parental Insights tool is worth setting up rather than relying on the age gate alone.
For general guidance on using AI companion apps in a healthy way — regardless of which platform you're on — see our site-wide responsible use guide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US) or your country's local equivalent.
The day-to-day experience is covered elsewhere: our Character.AI review and beginner's guide fill in what this page doesn't. Worth noting for parents specifically: AI Boyfriend is built around a single companion rather than an open library of user-made characters, which changes the shape of the content-moderation problem entirely.