Sam Altman says ChatGPT will soon sext with verified adults (www.theverge.com)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that ChatGPT will support “erotica” for users who verify their age once the company rolls out platform-level age-gating in December. Altman framed this as part of a “treat adult users like adults” principle and said developers will be able to create “mature” ChatGPT apps once appropriate age verification and controls are in place. The announcement accompanies product tweaks: GPT-5 was made the default but OpenAI reinstated GPT-4o as an option after users complained GPT-5 felt less personable; Altman also says a version that “behaves more like what people liked about 4o” is coming. The move signals a shift in OpenAI’s content-moderation trade-offs: the company says it relaxed prior restrictions after deploying better tools to detect mental distress and formed an eight-person “well-being and AI” council to guide responses to sensitive scenarios. Technical implications include platform-level age verification, updates to safety and detection models for mental-health signals, and expanded developer APIs or app categories for mature content. The rollout raises practical and ethical questions—how robust the age checks and distress-detection will be, whether safeguards address harm (notably the council lacks suicide-prevention experts), and how regulators and communities will respond to allowing explicit content on a mainstream AI platform.