About 12% of U.S. teens turn to AI for emotional support or advice
Summary
About 12% of U.S. teenagers use AI chatbots for emotional support or advice, alongside more common uses like searching for information and getting homework help. Mental health professionals warn that general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT are not designed for this purpose and can isolate users from real-world connections and relationships, potentially causing serious psychological harm.
Solution / Mitigation
Character.AI disabled chatbot access for users under 18 following lawsuits related to teen suicides. OpenAI sunset (discontinued) its GPT-4o model, which users had relied on for emotional support.
Classification
Affected Vendors
Related Issues
Original source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/25/about-12-of-u-s-teens-turn-to-ai-for-emotional-support-or-advice/
First tracked: February 25, 2026 at 11:00 AM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 85%