Mark Cuban, a parent of 3, says ChatGPT's new age restrictions for erotica could go really wrong (www.businessinsider.com)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that ChatGPT will allow "erotica" for verified adult users starting in December and that the company will “age‑gate more fully” alongside the change. The move follows a broader industry trend toward adult-friendly modes (for example, xAI’s Grok Imagine with a “spicy” setting) and comes after Altman had previously expressed reluctance about adding sexualized features. OpenAI’s terms still require users to be at least 13 and minors to have parental permission, but the new rollout centers on verification systems to limit access to adults. Tech entrepreneur and parent Mark Cuban pushed back publicly, arguing age‑gating will be ineffective and could backfire by pushing kids to other models or enabling older teens to share content with younger peers. His criticism highlights practical and technical challenges: age verification is hard to do at scale (self‑attestation and lightweight checks are easily circumvented), and content moderation must cope with creative bypasses, social leakage, and platform migration. The announcement raises governance, safety, and legal questions for AI developers about how to balance adult expression with child protection, and it signals that companies will need stronger verification, monitoring, and policy enforcement if they open models to explicit material.