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OpenAI releases open-source teen safety tools for AI developers

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OpenAI has spent the past year fielding lawsuits from the families of young people who died after extended interactions with ChatGPT. Now it is trying to give the developers who build on top of its models the tools to avoid creating the same problem.

The company announced on Tuesday that it is releasing a set of open-source, prompt-based safety policies designed to help developers make AI applications safer for teenagers. The policies are intended for use with gpt-oss-safeguard, OpenAI’s open-weight safety model, though they are designed as prompts and can work with other models too.

What the policies cover

The prompts target five categories of harm that AI systems can facilitate for younger users: graphic violence and sexual content, harmful body ideals and behaviours, dangerous activities and challenges, romantic or violent role play, and age-restricted goods and services. Developers can drop these policies into their systems rather than building teen safety rules from scratch, a process OpenAI acknowledged that even experienced teams frequently get wrong.

OpenAI developed the policies in collaboration with Common Sense Media, the influential child safety advocacy organisation, and everyone.ai, an AI safety consultancy. Robbie Torney, head of AI and digital assessments at Common Sense Media, said the prompt-based approach is designed to establish a baseline across the developer ecosystem, one that can be adapted and improved over time because the policies are open source.

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OpenAI itself framed the problem in pragmatic terms. Developers, the company wrote in a blog post accompanying the release, often struggle to translate safety goals into precise operational rules. The result is patchy protection: gaps in coverage, inconsistent enforcement, or filters so broad they degrade the user experience for everyone.

Context matters here

The release does not exist in a vacuum. OpenAI is facing at least eight lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT contributed to the deaths of users, including 16-year-old Adam Raine, who died by suicide in April 2025 after months of intensive interaction with the chatbot. Court filings revealed that ChatGPT mentioned suicide more than 1,200 times in Raine’s conversations and flagged hundreds of messages for self-harm content, yet never terminated a session or alerted anyone. Three additional suicides and four cases described as AI-induced psychotic episodes have also produced litigation against the company.

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In response to those cases, OpenAI introduced parental controls and age-prediction features in late 2025, and in December updated its Model Spec, the internal guidelines governing how its large language models behave, to include specific protections for users under 18. The open-source safety policies announced this week extend that effort beyond OpenAI’s own products and into the broader developer ecosystem.

A floor, not a ceiling

OpenAI was explicit that the policies are not a comprehensive solution to the challenge of making AI safe for young users. They represent what the company called a “meaningful safety floor,” not the full extent of the safeguards it applies to its own products. The distinction matters. No model’s guardrails are fully impenetrable, as the lawsuits have demonstrated. Users, including teenagers, have repeatedly found ways to bypass safety features through persistent probing and creative prompting.

The open-source approach is a bet that distributing baseline safety policies widely is better than leaving every developer to reinvent the wheel, particularly smaller teams and independent developers who lack the resources to build robust safety systems from scratch. Whether the policies are effective will depend on adoption, on how aggressively developers integrate them, and on whether they hold up against the kinds of sustained, adversarial interactions that have already exposed weaknesses in ChatGPT’s own safety layers.

The harder question remains

What OpenAI is offering is a set of instructions, well-crafted prompts that tell a model how to behave when interacting with younger users. It is a practical contribution. But it does not address the structural problem that regulators, parents, and safety advocates have been raising for years: that AI systems capable of sustained, emotionally engaging conversation with minors may require more than better prompts. They may require fundamentally different architectures, or external monitoring systems that sit outside the model entirely.

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For now, though, a downloadable set of teen safety policies is what exists. It is not nothing. Whether it is enough is a question the courts, the regulators, and the next set of headlines will answer.

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Spotify says AI slop is flooding your music feed, adds artist control tool

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Spotify is testing a new tool that lets artists approve songs before release, as AI-generated spam and fraud expose how easily fake tracks can hijack profiles and distort payouts.

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Big ideas, early traction: AI founders pitch VCs at Seattle-area startup showcase

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Panelists Hang Huang (InsForge), Brooke Borseth (FUSE), and Nate Bek (Ascend) with moderator Ke Du, offer the perspective from investors at the Seattle AI Startup Showcase. (Photo courtesy B.E.L.L.E)

Imagine you’re a property manager, and a washing machine breaks in one of your units. You text a vendor, who shows up without context and replaces it for $1,200. Turns out it was still under warranty. Had you known that, the repair would have cost $150.

Multiply that across 200 units and dozens of appliances, said Nicole Rémy, and you start to see how mid-size property managers lose tens of thousands of dollars a year — not from negligence, but from the absence of shared visibility.

Nicole Rémy pitches Pelly at the Seattle AI Startup Showcase in Bellevue. (Photo via B.E.L.L.E)

“I’m not guessing at customer problems,” said Rémy, founder of Pelly and a property manager herself. “I am a customer.”

Pelly is a coordination platform that puts property managers, vendors, residents, and owners on the same page: tracking assets, warranties, and service history in one place. Rémy runs a 215-unit property management company and built Pelly in part to solve her own problem.

Rémy was one of the founders who pitched Friday, March 20, in Bellevue at the Seattle AI Startup Showcase, hosted by B.E.L.L.E (Boundless, Entrepreneurship, Liberty, Liaison, Empowerment), a nonprofit focused on connecting early-stage founders with investors. 

Ten startup leaders pitched their companies, which covered everything from mental health and fintech to R&D infrastructure and online fraud prevention. 

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Anna Hong, who co-founded B.E.L.L.E with Lenka Huang, said she started the organization to empower female founders, though the community is inclusive and welcomes founders of all backgrounds, as reflected in the diversity of the founders who pitched at the showcase.

Hong is a three-time startup founder and venture partner at Aves Ventures; Huang is a lead AI strategist at Qurrent and former product manager at Meta and Zynga. 

The showcase was designed to give founders a stage and direct feedback from investors.

A panel of venture capitalists — Brooke Borseth from FUSE, Nate Bek from Ascend, and Hang Huang from InsForge — offered feedback on the pitches. Ke Du, a senior product manager at Apple and VP of programs at B.E.L.L.E, led the Q&A session.

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“We’re looking for big ideas, and fundamentally we’re just looking to back exceptional people who are building big things,” Borseth said.

Anna Hong, co-founder and CEO of B.E.L.L.E, addresses the crowd at the Seattle AI Startup Showcase in Bellevue. (Photo via B.E.L.L.E)

The panelists gave advice on what they look for in a pitch, red flags they see, and what information founders need to bring to an investor meeting. One of the biggest takeaways: the best pitches show “inevitable” growth — projections that sell a vision of a huge opportunity, educating investors on why the space is ready for a massive shift.

The founders weren’t pitching AI as a novelty. They were pitching it as a way to fix slow, regulated, and deeply inefficient systems where automation alone isn’t enough.

Examples include Precognition Labs, which is building tools to help marketplaces catch fraud in real time; Kednus, an AI compliance platform for model governance and digital asset monitoring; and Forge, which helps R&D projects manage budgets and stay compliant with government funding requirements.

In many cases, the pitches weren’t about replacing existing systems, but combining intelligence to make decisions faster and more reliable. 

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The pitches included companies at various stages of development. Some founders had customers, revenue, and pilots, while others were in early stages with prototypes and market projections but no signed customers. 

The panelists emphasized that for a founder to be ready to pitch, they must be able to articulate how big their product can be and demonstrate that it warrants venture capital.

Founders who pitched: Jordan Bain, Forge; Andy Yu, MeowSprout; Vinaya Kansal, Naptick; Rachel Wilka, Groforma; Suhas Manangi, Precognition Labs; Bella Davis, Monarch AI; Clement Utuk, Kednus; Victoria Yang, vicino.ai; Peeyush Kumar, Aquarius; Nicole Rémy, Pelly.

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Is Amazon’s Big Spring Sale better than Prime Day? I’ve hand-picked the 55 best deals on TVs, appliances, cheap tech gadgets, and more

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Welcome to today’s live coverage of Amazon’s 2026 Big Spring Sale. The sale officially kicks off today and runs through March 31, with new deals released every day.

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Need a new laptop? You might want to buy now, as Asus just warned that prices could soon jump by up to 30%

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  • An Asus exec has warned of big price hikes for PCs
  • Prices could rise by 25% to 30% in the second quarter in Taiwan, we’re told
  • This is likely to be reflected globally, and with other increasingly gloomy predictions hanging over the PC industry, it would seem the time to buy is now

Asus has warned that its laptops are going to get a lot more expensive in Taiwan, and while this doesn’t necessarily apply globally, you can bet it’s reflective of the situation worldwide — and the scale of the increase is seriously worrying.

As reported by UDN in Taiwan (flagged by VideoCardz), Asus said that PC prices in the country are going to rise by 25% to 30% in the second quarter of this year on average (with varying increases depending on the exact model, of course).

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B-2 Bombers Meet ‘Gunslinger’ Missiles In Impressive US Navy Drill

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US Air Force (USAF) B-2 Spirit stealth bombers recently trained alongside US Navy jet fighters in a maritime strike exercise conducted off the coast of California. The drill brought together aircraft from Carrier Air Wing 11 — the aviation element assigned to the USS Theodore Roosevelt (one of the oldest aircraft carriers still in service) — and at least one B-2 bomber from the USAF’s 509th Bomb Wing based at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. While the USAF publicly announced the exercise, officials didn’t specify exactly when the exercise took place. 

The drill was focused on integrated maritime strike operations — a mission that involves coordinating multiple aircraft types to engage seaborne targets. It was a mission that also introduced the $2 billion Spirit bomber to the Navy’s new AIM-174B “Gunslinger” missile — an air-launched weapon based on the service’s SM-6 interceptor. The Gunslingers were loaded on two of the participating Navy F/A-18E/F Super Hornets. 

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The exercise in itself is not unusual; the Navy and USAF regularly conduct such exercises. However, this one drew attention because it highlighted both the introduction of the AIM-174B and the evolving role of strategic bombers like the B-2 in maritime strike scenarios. 

Essentially, this sort of exercise is designed to give military planners an opportunity to test how long-range weapons, stealth aircraft, and naval aviation resources can operate together in complex missions designed to better defend US assets.

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Meet the Gunslinger

The AIM-174B “Gunslinger” was not developed from scratch. Rather, it traces its roots back to the Navy’s Standard Missile-6 (SM-6). Developed by Raytheon, the SM-6 is something of a multitool in the missile world. Originally designed for launch from Aegis-equipped warships, it can be used for anti-air warfare, ballistic missile defense, and against sea and ground targets at long ranges (thought to be about 230 miles). 

Essentially, the Gunslinger is the same missile as the SM-6 but adapted for air launch. Officially, it’s known as the SM-6 AIM-174B Air Launch Capability; the system is designed to pair with the F-18 Super Hornet, which remains one of the fastest US fighter jets in service today. This combination gives the Navy’s carrier-based fighters access to a much longer-range missile than traditional air-to-air missiles. 

Physically, the weapon is larger than many air-to-air missiles, stretching to more than 15 feet in length and weighing close to a ton. This is what allows it to carry both a larger propulsion system and a larger warhead. The result is a new weapon in the Navy’s armory that allows its jet fighters to engage threats at far greater distances. 

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Why the B-2 is showing up in naval warfare exercises

At first glance, the partnership between Naval assets and the B-2 Spirit might seem like a strange one. After all, the B-2 is more widely known as a platform for delivering precision weapons against land targets, sometimes flying on missions that can last for over 30 hours. However, what this exercise shows is how the US military is increasingly exploring a changing role for the aircraft and how it can be used to target ships. 

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One area of development is the USAF’s QUICKSINK program (the clue is in the name). This program converts existing weapons platforms into guided anti-ship weapons capable of striking moving targets. Instead of using more expensive purpose-built anti-ship missiles, the concept allows aircraft to use modified munitions equipped with guidance systems to target and sink enemy ships. This approach allows a lower-cost way to expand the military’s anti-ship arsenal, without building advanced missile systems. 

This isn’t the first involvement the B-2 has had with the program. In September 2025, a B-2 bomber from Whiteman Air Force Base joined Norwegian F-35 fighters during an exercise in the North Atlantic. The exercise included a maritime strike using a QUIKSINK weapon.

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‘Small enough to be tempting’: I need this award-winning turntable company’s new mini automatic vinyl-cleaning machine more than I’ll admit

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  • Pro-Ject unveils the VC-E Mini
  • It’s a vacuum-based automatic vinyl record cleaner
  • Designed to use few moving parts

My record collection isn’t mine, but an inheritance I try to take good care of. Or I thought I took great care of, but Pro-Ject’s new release has me thinking I could be doing a better at keeping them pristine.

The company behind the five-star Pro-Ject Debut Carbon and numerous more of the best turntables, has unveiled its latest vinyl cleaning device.

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Sony and Honda kill its Afeela EVs

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Sony Honda Mobility, the automotive venture from two of Japan’s most storied companies, has swung the axe on its EV project. In a statement, it said it would “discontinue the development and launch” of the Afeela 1 and 2, its long-in-development electric cars. The company added it would review its “business direction,” and announce its future plans “at the earliest possible opportunity.” Which, if we’re honest, probably means the whole thing is going to be shut down, or scaled back so much it’s no longer worth talking about.

2026 has not been a great year for Honda. On March 12, it posted an up-to $15.7 billion loss as it wrote off a big chunk of its investment in EVs. The US’ pivot toward fossil fuels, removal of federal EV tax credits and the imposition of tariffs has hit its business pretty hard. Not to mention the high-profile embarrassment of its current F1 engine project with Aston Martin, which promised so much and has delivered less than nothing.

Sony’s journey into the automotive world began six years ago with the announcement of the Vision-S, the car which would eventually be re-christened Afeela. But while the product looked good on trade show stands, it stood still while the rest of the car world sprinted ahead. In January, Tim Stevens said Afeela 1 looked a little dated, and a little lacking in emotion, and a lot more expensive than comparable models from rivals. Not to mention that Afeela 1 is a sedan, being sold to a world that’s increasingly fallen out of love with the type in favor of higher-riding SUVs. In Sony’s statement, however, the SUV-aping Afeela 2 didn’t even get a mention by name, which hints that it was as much an afterthought for the company as we might have guessed when it was announced.

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ChatGPT is getting a much-needed upgrade for managing your files

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OpenAI is finally addressing one of the most frustrating things about working with files in ChatGPT. The company is rolling out two new features to help users quickly access previously uploaded files, including a Recent files menu and a dedicated Library tab.

How do ChatGPT’s new file management features work?

Until now, files in ChatGPT were largely tied to individual conversations, which meant finding them often involved going back to the original chat and scrolling through long threads. The new Recent files option in the attachment menu now lists some of the files you’ve used most recently, making it easier to jump back into ongoing work without digging through older chats.

It’s now easier to find, reuse, and build on the files you upload and create in ChatGPT.

You can quickly reference files in a chat using recent files in the toolbar, ask ChatGPT about something you’ve uploaded, or browse your files in the new Library tab in the web sidebar.… pic.twitter.com/fIazWRF9h3

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) March 23, 2026

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On the web, there’s also a new Library tab in the sidebar. This acts as a central hub for all your uploaded and generated files, giving you a more organized view instead of tying everything to separate conversations. You can browse, search, and quickly attach files to new chats from this tab.

OpenAI also says ChatGPT can answer questions about files you’ve already uploaded, so you don’t need to reupload them every time you want more insights. Together, these changes make file reuse faster and far less tedious, especially if you regularly juggle files across multiple sessions.

Who’s getting access, and when?

The update is rolling out globally to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Business subscribers. Those in the EU, Switzerland, and the UK will have to wait a bit longer, with availability in these regions expected soon. There’s no word yet on whether these features will make their way to the free tier.

With these changes, OpenAI is continuing to position ChatGPT as more than just a chatbot, gradually turning it into a tool for managing ongoing work across conversations.

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X is changing its revenue-sharing policy to deter users pretending to be Americans

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X is updating its revenue-sharing incentives to give more weight to engagement from a user’s home region, Nikita Bier, the company’s Head of Product has announced. Bier said the change in policy was to “encourage content that resonates with people in [the user’s] country, in neighboring countries and people who speak [their] language.”

Bier continued that while X appreciates everyone’s opinion on US politics, the company is hoping the new policy can “disincentivize gaming the attention of US or Japanese accounts.” The US and Japan have the largest number of users on X. Bier didn’t mention it outright, but dozens of popular accounts tweeting pro-Trump sentiments and commentaries focusing on US politics in general were revealed to be based outside the US late last year, when X rolled out a transparency feature that exposed users’ locations. Those accounts, which pretended to be from the US and garnered millions of likes, views and reposts, turned out to be based in countries like India, Kenya and Nigeria.

“X will be a much richer community when there’s relevant posts for people in all parts of the world,” Bier said. When one user responded to his post that some countries barely have any users, making it hard to earn money from the website, Bier just suggested that they should write about their day-to-day experiences. “Of course, you’re welcome to continue chiming in on America politics. We just won’t send money overseas for that content,” he said. X’s new policy will start taking effect on Thursday, March 26.

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Iranians Don’t Have a Missile Alert System, So Volunteers Built Their Own Warning Map

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Since Donald Trump’s war on Iran started more than three weeks ago, United States military forces have allegedly attacked more than 9,000 sites, creating a climate of fear and constant uncertainty for Iranians in Tehran and across the country. Without an advanced warning system from the government, and amid the longest internet shutdown in Iran’s history, Iranians are left in an information void.

Even before Israel and the United States began dropping bombs, Iran’s lack of a public emergency alert tool and severe state-controlled digital oppression has impacted tens of millions of citizens. Since the 12-day Israel-Iran war last year, though, a group of Iranian digital rights activists and volunteers has been working to fill the gap with a dynamic, regularly updated mapping platform called Mahsa Alert. The project can’t replace real-time early alerts that could come from a coordinated government service, but the tool sends push notifications when Israeli forces warn about attacks, details some confirmed strike locations, and offers offline mapping capabilities.

“There is no emergency alert in Iran,” says Ahmad Ahmadian, the president and CEO of US-based digital rights group Holistic Resilience, which is behind Mahsa Alert and has been developing the platform since last summer. “This was where we saw the traction, we saw the need, and we continued working on it with the volunteers, with some [open source intelligence] experts, and used this to map the repression machinery ecosystem of Iran and surveillance.”

Mahsa Alert is a website but also has Android and iOS apps, which were intentionally designed to be lightweight and easy to use on any device. Given the heavy government connectivity control inside Iran and erratic access to the internet, volunteers also prioritized engineering the platform for offline use. And it can be easily updated if a user does get connectivity for a brief period by downloading APK files that contain new data. The team works to keep these updates extremely small; a recent release was 60 kilobytes, and Ahmadian says they are typically no more than 100 kilobytes.

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One overlay on Mahsa Alerts plots the locations of “confirmed attacks” that Ahmadian says his team or other OSINT investigators have verified, using video footage or images that are submitted to a Telegram bot or shared on social media. There are also warnings about areas where Israeli forces have issued evacuation alerts, along with the crucial component of people submitting reports on what is happening around them.

“We have to go through a due diligence and verification process and tag them before putting them on the map,” Ahmadian says of the reported attacks and incidents, adding that the team has a backlog of more than 3,000 reports that it is working through or is unable to verify. Along with attempting to map strikes, the team behind Mahsa Alert have also plotted “danger zones” that could be at risk of attack—such as sites linked to Iran’s nuclear program or military—so ordinary citizens can stay away from them. Ahmadian claims 90 percent of attacks it has confirmed were at sites that were already present on the map. “Some of them that we can confirm, we do it because [a user] has shared a photo or they have shared some details that makes them verifiable,” he says.

The map also includes locations of thousands of CCTV cameras, suspected government checkpoints, and other domestic infrastructure. Medical facilities, such as hospitals and pharmacies, are included on the map along with other resources like the locations of religious sites and past protests.

Mahsa Alert has become more visible on global social media feeds as Iranians around the world share details from the map, encouraging people to look into the service and flagging it for friends and family who could use it as a resource. “The app went from near zero to over 100,000 daily active users in a matter of days,” Ahmadian says, adding that in total there have been around 335,000 users this year, with people first turning to the app during the Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters in January. Through the limited user information the app collects, Ahmadian claims there are signs that 28 percent of users are accessing the platform from inside Iran.

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