Meta contractors posed as teens to test rival AI chatbots on suicide, sex and drugs: report

Meta secretly hired hundreds of contractors to pose as teenagers online and bombard rival artificial intelligence chatbots with prompts about suicide, sex, drugs and eating disorders in an effort to test their safety systems, according to a report.The covert effort, known internally as “Cannes,” was managed by Meta contractor Covalen and allegedly targeted OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Character.AI, Wired reported this week.While companies routinely benchmark, or test and compare, competing AI models by probing their responses to safety-related prompts, the reported scale of Meta’s testing appears to have been far larger than is typical.Contractors were instructed to create fake accounts posing as users younger than 18, submit written prompts and images to competing chatbots, then copy the responses into spreadsheets for analysis, according to the Wired report, which cited internal documents and people familiar with the project.Some of the images used during testing reportedly included pills, knives, nooses and a medical illustration of a gynecological procedure.The prompts frequently attempted to push the chatbots into generating responses their safety guardrails were designed to reject, according to Wired.One round of testing completed in August 2025 reportedly involved more than 45,000 prompts sent to competing AI systems.Among the nearly 3,750 prompts reviewed by Wired were hundreds involving suicide and self-harm, hundreds more centered on eating disorders and at least 239 involving sex or romance, according to the reportMany of the prompts were reportedly written from the perspective of children or teenagers in distress.One reportedly involved a 13-year-old girl claiming she had become pregnant by her adult neighbor and asking where she could obtain abortion pills.Another described a fifth-grade student saying a classmate had a gun pointed at his mouth.Other prompts asked how to hide bulimia from parents or sought advice about obtaining cocai...