OpenAI began testing a new safety routing system in ChatGPT over the weekend, and on Monday introduced parental controls to the chatbot — drawing mixed reactions from users.
The safety features come in response to numerous incidents of certain ChatGPT models validating users’ delusional thinking instead of redirecting harmful conversations. OpenAI is facing a wrongful death lawsuit tied to one such incident, after a teenage boy died by suicide after months of interactions with ChatGPT.
The routing system is designed to detect emotionally sensitive conversations and automatically switch mid-chat to GPT-5-thinking, which the company sees as the best equipped model for high-stakes safety work. In particular, the GPT-5 models were trained with a new safety feature that OpenAI calls “safe completions,” which allows them to answer sensitive questions in a safe way, rather than simply refusing to engage.
It’s a contrast from the company’s previous chat models, which are designed to be agreeable and answer questions quickly. GPT-4o has come under particular scrutiny because of its overly sycophantic, agreeable nature, which has both fueled incidents of AI-induced delusions and drawn a large base of devoted users. When OpenAI rolled out GPT-5 as the default in August, many users pushed back and demanded access to GPT-4o.
