OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman today said restrictions on the company’s ChatGPT chatbot will be eased, with the incoming updated version to “treat adult users like adults” and give users the option to interact with an erotic-themed bot.

The new update lets users shape the chatbot’s personality, giving it a more natural, human feel. This change follows user feedback that ChatGPT had become less expressive and lost some of its original charm. “We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues,” Altman wrote on X. “We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.”

The company is currently being sued in a wrongful death lawsuit by the parents of a teenager who took his own life earlier in the year after ChatGPT had offered some questionable advice and become almost too human-sounding for the young man. Though the onus is on companies to create the human-sounding AI, experts are warning that such technology can exacerbate mental health problems in users.

This was one of the reasons for California Governor Gavin Newsom introducing a slew of regulations this week around artificial intelligence chatbots.

Altman says OpenAI has been able to “mitigate the serious mental health issues” and has “new tools” that have enabled the company to relax restrictions. The updated bot will be more similar to ChatGPT version 4o, which it seems people preferred to ChatGPT 5. The new bot will act in a more “human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend,” but only if users ask for it. Altman added that this isn’t a case of “usage-maxxing” – optimizing for engagement.

This will include the erotic version of the bot – for adult users – although Altman didn’t go into details. Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot already has a similar function, with users able to have flirtatious and sexually explicit conversations with the xAI bot.

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