Children in the Age of Generative AI
Emerging threats to children on AI-powered platforms, and the safety-by-design measures that platforms, schools, and policymakers must put in their path.
Listen
Children in the Age of Generative AI
A ~13-minute audio interview about the report with Dr. Krzysztof Pietroszek, President of FAIR Labs. Produced with www.allais.com.
Summary
The bottom line for those who protect children
Generative AI does not merely add new content to children's online lives; it changes the character of the environment itself. Content can now be produced on demand, tailored to a particular child, and delivered by a system that appears to understand and care. This report gives platforms, schools, and policymakers a structured way to see the resulting harms— synthetic abuse material, manipulative companionship, engagement-driven rabbit holes, and the quiet profiling of minors—and a set of safety-by-design commitments that address each at the level of product architecture rather than after-the-fact moderation. The organizing principle is simple and old: when a service is likely to be accessed by children, the best interests of the child come first.
Emerging threats to children on AI-powered platforms, and the safety-by-design measures that platforms, schools, and policymakers must put in their path.
Key findings
- Design for the child by default. Configure the highest-privacy, lowest-risk settings as the default for any service likely to be accessed by minors, and require an affirmative, age-appropriate step to relax them. Safety should be the resting state, not an option a child must discover.
- Prevent, detect, and report abuse material. Treat the generation, storage, and transmission of synthetic child sexual abuse material as a design failure to be engineered against, a hazard to be actively detected, and— when found—a matter for mandatory reporting to the appropriate authorities.
How to cite this report
Children in the Age of Generative AI. FAIR Labs Research Report. Fair Artificial Intelligence Research Labs, 2026. Available at https://fairlabs.ai/research/children-generative-ai
FAIR Labs (Fair Artificial Intelligence Research Labs) is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research institute in Washington, DC. Its reports may be reproduced with attribution for non-commercial purposes. For interviews, briefings or data requests, use the contact form.