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out of character

Teens are upset that they can’t speak to Character.AI chatbots anymore

The platform has restricted access for those under 18, as concerns around the tech’s impact grow.

11/25/25 10:12AM

As far as execs at Character.AI are concerned, (role) playtime’s over for under-18s, as they start to ban teens from using the platform’s chatbots this week.

The chatbot company, which clocks about 184 million website visits around the world each month — and millions more app sessions — per data from Similarweb, announced at the end of last month that it would be rolling back access to its open-ended chat feature for minors. Users who are under 18 have been limited to daily two-hour open-ended chats since the late October notice, and access started ramping down for most of those in the age range yesterday.

Indeed, a selection of young “power users,” as The Wall Street Journal termed them in a piece on the anguish some under-18 users are experiencing at being separated from the chatbots, are being given a weeks-long grace period where they can still access hour-long open-ended chats with the characters they’ve been interacting with, to “help minimize disruption” to the teen users.

Clearly, AI-generated conversations with popular characters like Yor Forger, “a loving mom who’s definitely not an assassin,” and Itoshi Rin, who “only loves soccer... and you,” have a lot of (mostly younger) users in the site’s full thrall.

Character.ai demographic chart — Sherwood News

Though traffic-tracking site Similarweb doesn’t break out under-18s in its demographics data, the figures it does disclose already show that Character.AI tends to skew a lot younger than more general competitors like ChatGPT.

According to US-specific figures from Similarweb, of the 1.7 million monthly unique web visitors character.ai notched on average from August to October, some 52% were aged between 18 and 24, compared to a 26% share on chatgpt.com.

A lot to talk about

Character.AI’s younger users tend to be way more locked in, too: per the data, they visited 26 times each month on average and spent 18 minutes in a typical session using Character.AI — much higher than ChatGPT users, who visited the OpenAI chatbot 13 times on average across the month, spending around 6 minutes per visit.

Those sorts of numbers, paired with deaths linked to the platform and increasing concerns around the detrimental effects of chatbots on younger minds more generally, were likely factors in the move to pare back teen user access, which — at least according to Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand — “wasn’t a very hard decision.”

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5