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OpenAI’s commitment to child safety: adopting safety by design principles

We’re joining Thorn, All Tech Is Human, and other leading companies in an effort to prevent the misuse of generative AI to perpetrate, proliferate, and further sexual harms against children. 

OpenAI, alongside industry leaders including Amazon, Anthropic, Civitai, Google, Meta, Metaphysic, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Stability AI, has committed to implementing robust child safety measures in the development, deployment, and maintenance of generative AI technologies as articulated in the Safety by Design principles. This initiative, led by Thorn, a nonprofit dedicated to defending children from sexual abuse, and All Tech Is Human, an organization dedicated to tackling tech and society's complex problems, aims to mitigate the risks generative AI poses to children. By adopting comprehensive Safety by Design principles, OpenAI and our peers are ensuring that child safety is prioritized at every stage in the development of AI. To date, we have made significant effort to minimize the potential for our models to generate content that harms children, set age restrictions for ChatGPT, and actively engage with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Tech Coalition, and other government and industry stakeholders on child protection issues and enhancements to reporting mechanisms. 

As part of this Safety by Design effort, we commit to:

1. Develop: Develop, build, and train generative AI models that proactively address child safety risks.
   • Responsibly source our training datasets, detect and remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) from training data, and report any confirmed CSAM to the relevant authorities.
   • Incorporate feedback loops and iterative stress-testing strategies in our development process.
   • Deploy solutions to address adversarial misuse.
2. Deploy: Release and distribute generative AI models after they have been trained and evaluated for child safety, providing protections throughout the process.
   • Combat and respond to abusive content and conduct, and incorporate prevention efforts.
   • Encourage developer ownership in safety by design.
3. Maintain: Maintain model and platform safety by continuing to actively understand and respond to child safety risks.
   • Committed to removing new AIG-CSAM generated by bad actors from our platform. 
   • Invest in research and future technology solutions.
   • Fight CSAM, AIG-CSAM and CSEM on our platforms.

This commitment marks an important step in preventing the misuse of AI technologies to create or spread child sexual abuse material (AIG-CSAM) and other forms of sexual harm against children. As part of the working group, we have also agreed to release progress updates every year.