(DCNF)—OpenAI released what it is presenting as a teen-friendly version of its popular artificial intelligence chatbot aimed at protecting teens from harmful online content.
The AI company announced ChatGPT for Teens, new version of ChatGPT for kids between ages 13 and 17, on Tuesday. This teen mode automatically enrolls users under 18 and features more parental control features. This arrived the same day as Meta’s $1.4 trillion social media addiction trial began in Oakland, CA, where California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey claim Meta used harmful practices to harm youth, the Associated Press reported.
“ChatGPT should not use romantic language, encourage emotional dependence, or imply that it has feelings or consciousness,” OpenAI said in its Tuesday announcement. “These stronger protections are designed to reinforce healthy, real-world relationships.”
The chatbot in teen mode is guided by several Under-18 Principles. These include an emphasis to seek real-world connections for support, reminders to teen users that the chatbot is not human, and prohibiting the chatbot from partaking in activities like “immersive romantic roleplay, first-person intimacy, or pairing the assistant romantically with a teen,” or “romanticizing or providing instructions on self-harm or suicide,” according to OpenAI’s outline of the teen model’s “intended behavior.”
The AI firm said the teen experience adds to the company’s efforts to support children with its services.
“OpenAI, the same company whose chatbots coached multiple kids to commit suicide and self-harm, now wants parents and teachers to trust them to protect and teach vulnerable teens,” Daniel Cochrane, Senior Fellow with the Family First Technology Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Matthew and Marie Raine’s son Adam committed suicide in April 2025 after ChatGPT allegedly assisted him in the act, leading the family to sue the AI company, Reuters reported.
“ChatGPT began discussing suicide methods and provided Adam with technical specifications for everything from drug overdoses to drowning to carbon monoxide poisoning,” in Jan. 2025, the family’s complaint against OpenAI alleged.
“We need to prevent Big AI from peddling dangerous, manipulative chatbots to kids and require them to implement rigorous third-party pre-deployment safety testing,” Cochrane told the DCNF. He called on legislators to require AI companies to face liability if they fail to look out for the best interest of children.
One legal group, which represents the Raine family, thought the announcement was the result of public pressure to make its chatbots safer for children.
“OpenAI’s announcement today of its ‘teen experience’ is clear indication the company is feeling the mounting public pressure to create a safer experience for young users of its products,” Meetali Jain, Executive Director of Tech Justice Law, told the DCNF.
“To truly demonstrate its commitment to safety, the company should be open about how it builds its products and plans to operationalize its proposed safeguards, as well as commit to independent third-party testing,” Jain told the DCNF. “As long as these companies are self-policing, we will never be able to hold them to their word.”
Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah introduced the “SAFE KIDS Act,” in June. The bill would mandate AI companies to include parental control and child safety settings when designing their chatbots, conduct independent audits of the products, and prevent children’s data from being shared.
The bill would further restrict AI companies from allowing chatbots to “lead a child of the same age as the user to believe that they are interacting with a human,” according to the bill.
OpenAI, Character.AI, the Social Media Victims Law Center, Edelson PC, ParentsTogether, CodeAI, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the office of Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
The Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Public Affairs declined to comment.
Child-safety advocacy groups feel parents should be skeptical before allowing their children to use ChatGPT’s teen mode.
“Based on our prior testing of ChatGPT’s teen protections, we have questions about these new features’ safety and efficacy we’d want to see answered before families put trust in them,” Robbie Torney, Common Sense Media’s Head of AI & Digital Assessments, told the DCNF. He said
“We have learned from social media that parental controls don’t help most families because people don’t understand or adopt them. While we think distinct, age-appropriate experiences for minors is the right direction for chatbots, there is a lot we still need to know about the new ChatGPT for teens,” Torney added.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
