We want teens to have age-appropriate experiences with AI and to keep parents informed if we identify their teen may be in distress. Today we are announcing additional safeguards to ensure we respond appropriately to sensitive conversations surrounding suicide and self-harm. This means acknowledging teens’ feelings while helping them get the offline support they need – whether from parents, a professional hotline or emergency services.
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Use Meta AI to alert parents when their teen talks about suicide or self-harm
If a teen suggests they are considering suicide or self-harm, Meta AI already refers them to crisis hotlines and encourages them to reach out to a parent or other trusted adult, such as a counselor. Now we also proactively notify caring parents when their teen’s meta-AI chat suggests they may be at risk, based on signals developed with experts. We provide expert resources to help parents address these conversations with their teens.
We worked with parents and experts to understand which AI conversations require a warning – such as those in which a teenager clearly indicates that they are self-harming, even if the indication is subtle. We then developed a special AI system to identify these conversations.
We understand how distressing these warnings can be for parents. As we continue to improve our detection, all chats flagged by our AI will be manually reviewed before sending an alert. If a teenager’s intent is unclear, we err on the side of caution and make parents aware. While this means that we will sometimes notify parents when there is no real cause for concern, we believe this is the right place to start and we will continue to monitor the situation to ensure we are in the right place.
“While I believe that teenagers have a right to privacy, I also believe that parents need to be informed when their teenager is at risk of self-harm. That is why I have advocated for this approach and support Meta’s decision to notify parents if, after careful review, it is determined that a conversation with Meta AI contains evidence of possible suicide or self-harm that warrants a warning. I appreciate how Meta has struck the right balance: protecting teenagers’ privacy while ensuring that parents have the information they need to support theirs Teenagers need.”
— Larry Magid, CEO and co-founder of ConnectSafely
These notifications are now available to parents Parental supervision on Instagram will be available in the US, UK, Australia and Canada and will be available to care for parents worldwide by the end of the year. They build up Warnings We already send caring parents if their teenager repeatedly searches for suicide or self-harm terms on Instagram within a short period of time.
Alerting the emergency services about possible suicide risks
We are building the ability to contact emergency services if a person’s conversation – be it an adult or a teenager – with Meta AI suggests they are in imminent danger of taking their own life. This builds on the work we already do on Facebook and Instagram: If we become aware of a post that indicates a credible risk of suicide, we alert emergency services. Last year, we made over 19,000 such referrals worldwide, helping first responders conduct health checks on people who may be at risk of suicide.
Work with experts to improve Meta AI’s responses to suicide and self-harm
In addition to ongoing consultations with our AI Wellbeing Expert Council, Suicide and Self-Harm Advisory Group and Youth Advisors, we have collected feedback from over 75 mental health professionals on how Meta AI is responding to teens’ calls for suicide and self-harm. These clinicians, all of whom specialize in teen mental health, reviewed the AI’s responses to hundreds of prompts and provided feedback on whether they were appropriate for teens, what worked well, and how they could be improved.
We use this feedback to further improve the way Meta AI interacts with teens on these sensitive topics – for example, by ensuring that Meta AI takes teens’ feelings into account when pointing them to supportive resources and doesn’t end the conversation too abruptly.
“I was impressed by the rigor of Meta’s clinical review process, examining not only immediate responses to suicide and self-harm concerns, but also the broader conversation context, appropriate follow-up, and the varying levels of risk that can exist even in high-risk situations. This type of expert-informed, scenario-based refinement is essential to making AI experiences safer for youth.”
—Dr. Ji-yeon Lee, licensed psychologist (USA) and professor of counseling psychology at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (South Korea)
Introducing the stricter restricted content setting for Meta AI chats
Teen accounts are automatically placed in a 13+ content setting, which also applies to conversations with Meta AI. In this default setting for ages 13 and up, Meta AI is designed to give age-appropriate answers and not to follow sensitive requests. For example, Meta AI is trained not to engage in sexual or romantic conversations with teenagers or to provide recipes for alcoholic drinks, but instead direct teenagers to safer topics.
We have it in October announced Limited Content as a stricter content setting for parents who prefer a more restrictive experience for their teens on Instagram – and now that stricter setting also applies to AI experiences. This means that if parents opt their teens into the “Limited Content” setting on Instagram, the types of conversations teens can have with Meta AI will also be further limited. In the “Restricted Content” setting, Meta AI declines to respond to a wider range of prompts, further reducing the likelihood of potentially inappropriate conversations.
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/07/keeping-parents-informed-teens-distress-conversations-meta-ai/
