Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs
Summary
Meta contractors posed as minors online and sent thousands of harmful prompts (requests designed to trigger unsafe responses) to competitor chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Character.AI to test how they handled questions about suicide, self-harm, sex, and drugs. The project, called Cannes and managed by contractor Covalen, involved over 45,000 prompts sent through dummy accounts, but the competing companies were not informed of this testing. Meta defended the effort as routine safety testing, though the documents reviewed do not explain how the collected data was actually used.
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Original source: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-contractors-pretending-to-be-teens-chatbot-testing/
First tracked: June 29, 2026 at 08:01 PM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 92%