Singapore Weighs Mandatory Age Checks for AI Chatbots as ChatGPT for Teens Debuts
Source: The Straits Times
Singapore is weighing mandatory age checks on AI chatbots after OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens with only voluntary age declaration — a gap experts say leaves young users exposed. IMDA’s app-store age-gating precedent and uneven industry practice are driving the regulatory debate.
Singapore is moving towards treating AI chatbots the way it already treats app stores: by gating who gets to use them based on age. The trigger is OpenAI's rollout of ChatGPT for Teens, which went live from Aug 19 with filters meant to block content on self-harm, violence, eating disorders and explicit sex. The catch, as The Straits Times notes, is that young users are only prompted to declare they are under 18 during registration, and the age they enter is never verified — a voluntary system that leaves underage users exposed to platforms ranging from harmless to harmful.
Singapore has a framework that could be the template. Since April, the Infocomm Media Development Authority has required app stores to prevent users under 18 from downloading inappropriate apps, such as those for dating or sexual content. Age can be determined through government-issued identity documents, credit card information, facial scans or analysis of online usage patterns — and IMDA has signalled plans to extend these checks to social media services, where unmanaged direct messaging from strangers and auto-playing videos are flagged as risk points. Arguments for extending the same logic to AI chatbots are gathering force as chatbots get embedded into the very messaging and social platforms these rules would target.
Experts quoted in the analysis see mandatory age checks as the missing piece. Lim Sun Sun, Lee Kong Chian Professor of Communication and Technology at Singapore Management University, argues that regulatory intervention such as mandated age checks should extend to all emerging tech that young people can reach, pushing AI companies to take firmer ownership of their responsibility to younger users. Nanyang Technological University's Zhang Renwen goes further, proposing that youth safety filters should be the default for everyone, not just minors — because harmful interactions do not stop at the under-18 line.
The unevenness of current industry practice shows why regulation is being debated. Anthropic is the strictest, requiring every user to register and disabling accounts it determines belong to under-18s. OpenAI and Google apply safeguards to registered underage users, yet users do not need an account at all to start a conversation with Gemini. Character.AI banned open-ended chats for under-18s in 2025. The concern, as ST frames it, is that without a consistent standard, young people will simply migrate to whichever chatbot has the fewest restrictions — defeating the purpose of safety measures. High-profile harms have already been linked to chatbots, from Grok's sexually explicit deepfake scandal in January to the 2024 death of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III after obsessive chats with a Character.AI persona.
Why it matters for Singapore: Singapore's online safety regime has been edging toward age-appropriate compartmentalisation — first app stores, now social media, and increasingly AI chatbots, which blur the lines between the two. The government has said it is studying safeguards for online games and AI chatbots, and this debate gives IMDA a clear precedent to build on. How Singapore resolves mandatory age verification for generative AI will set a regional benchmark for balancing youth protection against the friction of verified access, and it will test whether the country's privacy-first approach to identity can co-exist with the identity checks that age gating demands.
