I n August, OpenAI launched Teen Mode – a version of ChatGPT in which every user under 18 will automatically be enrolled – a year after a lawsuit alleged that ChatGPT had contributed to the suicide of a 16-year-old named Adam Raine.

For years, the tech industry has contested any causal link between its products and the harms named in a wave of similar lawsuits, each alleging that the companies had not merely failed to protect children but had deliberately designed products to exploit them.

Teen Mode is a tacit admission of culpability and it reveals what the industry now acknowledges – and doesn’t – about its products’ negative effects on young users’ mental health.

As a psychoanalyst who works with young people, I’ve been observing, up close, the impact of social media and AI on their psychological development: how these tools influence not only behavior or mood at the day-to-day level, but identity formation and character.

Teen mode may address some of the harms done to teenagers.…