OpenAI has announced that it will add parental controls to ChatGPT following the suicide of a 16-year-old teenager whose family said he spent months talking to ChatGPT before ending his life.

The company said in a statement that it is considering new options that include enabling parents to monitor how their children use ChatGPT, and allowing an emergency contact to be directly accessible through messages or calls with a single click, with the possibility for the bot itself to communicate with this entity in emergency situations.

The incident sparked widespread controversy after the New York Times published a report on the death of teenager Adam Ryan, followed by a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in California state court in San Francisco.