OpenAI Pushes Ahead With ChatGPT Erotica Mode Despite ‘Sexy Suicide Coach’ Warning: WSJ

Sam Altman wants ChatGPT to talk dirty. His firm’s advisers want him to stop, a report claims.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, OpenAI’s Expert Council on Well-Being and AI made its stance clear in January: The company’s plan to allow erotic conversations in ChatGPT was a bad idea. One council member, citing users who took their own lives after forming intense emotional bonds with the chatbot, reportedly warned that OpenAI risked creating a “sexy suicide coach.”

But OpenAI apparently didn’t flinch, and told the council it was delaying its launch, but not stopping it.

The plan, which Altman first floated publicly in October on X, would let verified adults use ChatGPT for text-based erotic conversations—what the company’s spokeswoman described to the WSJ as “smut rather than pornography.” No erotic images, no voice, and no video, per the WSJ report. Just text.

That distinction hasn’t calmed critics inside or outside the company. OpenAI has already been criticized even by former staff members like security researcher Jan Leike, for steering away from strict safety policies in exchange for “shiny products,” some of which were being configured to boost engagement with some users replacing real-world relationships with the chatbot.

The technical problems are just as thorny. OpenAI’s age-prediction system—the gatekeeper meant to keep minors from triggering adult chats—was at one point misclassifying teenagers as adults roughly 12% of the time, the WSJ reports. Right now, ChatGPT has around 900 million active users.

That 12% error rate was the number that killed the December launch, and the Q1 2026 one after it. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, acknowledged the delay during a December briefing, citing ongoing work to perfect the age verification system.

At the time, Decrypt reported that over 3,000 users had already signed a Change.org petition demanding the launch of the feature, frustrated that ChatGPT was blocking even discussions of “kissing and non-sexual physical intimacy.”

The council’s fury in January wasn’t only about the content. Altman’s October X post had blindsided his own team—he published it just hours after OpenAI announced the well-being council, a body explicitly tasked with defining “what healthy interactions with AI should look like for all ages.” The timing was, at minimum, a contradiction.

OpenAI assembled the eight-member Expert Council last October, pulling in researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. Their role was to advise the company on the mental health impacts of its products. Their actual influence on company decisions, based on January’s meeting, appears to have been minimal at best.

“This seems part of the usual pattern of move fast, break things, and try to fix some things after they get embarrassing,” an AlgorithmWatch spokesperson told Decrypt when the council was announced.

The competitive pressure on OpenAI is real. Grok, from Elon Musk’s xAI, already markets AI companions. Character.AI built its user base on AI romance before facing lawsuits over teen safety—including the case of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer, who died by suicide after explicit chatbot exchanges. Open-source models run locally without any corporate guardrails. OpenAI has, by far, more liability exposure than anyone in the room given its user base.

Altman has framed the content ban as an overreach—”We aren’t the elected moral police of the world,” he wrote on X in October.

But his own advisers have made their position unambiguous, his engineers can’t yet build an age filter that works, and the launch date keeps moving. Treating adults like adults, it turns out, is harder than just sending an X post.

OpenAI told Decrypt that it had nothing to add to the Journal‘s report, and that it has no updated timeline for the launch of the erotica mode.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include the response from OpenAI.