Education & Student Safety AI
Character.AI
Critical riskConsumer companion-chatbot platform where users chat with user-created AI personas; it has no education product, but is one of the most heavily used AI apps among teenagers.
Is Character.AI safe for confidential data?
Character.AI is not a school tool and should not be treated as one — it appears in this directory because students use it heavily and schools are being asked whether to block it. The record is the most serious in consumer AI: wrongful-death and injury lawsuits from families of minors, including the case of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, which Character.AI and Google agreed to settle in January 2026 alongside other suits; a Texas suit alleging harm to children aged 11 and 17; and inclusion in the FTC's September 2025 6(b) inquiry into companion chatbots' effects on minors. Under that pressure the company removed open-ended chat for under-18s as of late November 2025, backed by behavioral age assurance with ID and facial-recognition fallbacks. For schools the questions are filtering, awareness, and what students disclose to companion bots — not procurement.
Risk by plan
The same product often carries very different terms depending on the tier — consumer plans are where the exposure concentrates.
Open-ended chat now restricted to verified adults; under-18s are limited to structured creation features after the November 2025 phase-out.
Faster responses and perks only — the subscription does not change data-use terms and offers nothing resembling an institutional agreement.
Data handling
Training on inputs
Consumer terms permit use of conversations to improve and train models; there is no enterprise tier or DPA. Treat anything typed into it as disclosed to the vendor.
Retention
Consumer-grade retention under the vendor's privacy policy, with no institutional controls, admin visibility, or contractual deletion terms available to a school.
Residency
U.S.-hosted consumer service; no residency options. No mechanism exists for a Canadian school board to bring it under a PIA-compatible agreement, which is effectively the answer to whether it belongs in classrooms.
Compliance
- SOC 2Not verified
- GDPR / DPANo
- HIPAA BAANo
Certifications typically apply to specific tiers and contracts — confirm scope in writing before relying on them.
New to these frameworks? See our plain-language guides to SOC 2 and the other AI compliance standards.
Enterprise controls
- None — no education or enterprise offering
- Age assurance for open-ended chat (rolled out November 2025)
- Parental insights features for teen accounts
Frequently asked questions
Is Character AI safe for kids?
The company's own November 2025 decision to end open-ended chatbot conversations for under-18s is the clearest answer available. That change followed wrongful-death and injury lawsuits involving minors — including the Setzer case, settled along with others by Character.AI and Google in January 2026 — and an FTC inquiry into companion chatbots and children. Teens still reach it through age-verification workarounds and adult accounts, so parental controls and conversation matter more than the platform's gate.
Should schools block Character AI?
Most district filtering policies now treat companion-chatbot platforms as block-by-default on school networks and devices, and Character.AI is the canonical case: no educational purpose, no DPA, and a documented harm record. Blocking on managed networks is straightforward; the harder work is that most use happens on personal devices at home, which filtering cannot reach.
Why is a consumer chatbot in a school risk directory at all?
Because student AI use does not stay inside sanctioned tools. Students who use companion bots at home also disclose personal, mental-health, and school-related information to them, and staff sometimes discover it only after an incident. A realistic school AI policy names this category explicitly, tells families what the November 2025 age restrictions do and do not cover, and gives students a disclosure-safe alternative for schoolwork.
Policy changelog
- Initial entry published from Character Technologies' announcements and cited coverage of litigation and regulatory action.
Sources
- TechCrunch on the under-18 phase-out (Oct 29, 2025)
- FTC 6(b) inquiry into AI companion chatbots (Sept 2025)
- CNN on the January 2026 settlements
- K-12 Dive on settlement mediation
This profile summarizes the vendor's published policies as of the verification date. It is not legal advice.
Character.AI is probably already in your organization.
Sanitized AI shows you who is using it and redacts sensitive data from prompts before it leaves your control.
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