If your child has PolyBuzz on their phone, the first thing worth knowing is that officially, they shouldn't. PolyBuzz's own terms of service set the minimum age at 18, no exceptions: "You must have reached 18-year-old to use PolyBuzz and/or our Services. PolyBuzz and/or our Services strictly prohibit for minors (less than 18-year-old) worldwide.
That's a clear rule. What's less clear is how much it actually stops anyone.
What PolyBuzz is
PolyBuzz (formerly Poly.AI, unrelated to a voice-tech company with a similar name) is an AI character chat app: roleplay conversations with AI-generated personas, character creation, and AI image generation, in the same general category as Character.AI. We don't have usage figures for who's actually on it, but the searches already landing on our own site tell their own story: "what age is PolyBuzz for", "is PolyBuzz safe", "how old do you have to be to use PolyBuzz". Someone is asking, and it's not always clear whether that someone is a parent or the teenager who already has the app.
How the age check actually works
Outside the UK, PolyBuzz asks for a birthdate the first time you use it, whether as a guest or a registered user. That's it. There's no ID check, no photo verification, nothing that confirms the date typed in is real. The terms say a false birthdate can get an account suspended if PolyBuzz "determines" it's false, but nothing in the sign-up flow is built to catch it in the first place. A child who knows to type a different birth year can get straight past this.
The one exception is the UK. Because of the Online Safety Act, UK users go through mandatory age verification from two named third-party providers, Ondato and Yoti, before they can access the app, and where age can't be verified, access to the relevant features is restricted. That's a real barrier, not just a checkbox, and it's worth UK families knowing it's there.
What the 18+ rule doesn't cover
Even where age verification does its job at the door, it says nothing about what happens once someone is inside. PolyBuzz's own FAQ describes one-to-one chats as private in a specific way: "neither the creators nor Poly have access to the chat content between users and the AI characters." Public content, like character profiles and anything shown to other users, gets AI screening and human moderation. Private conversations don't get the same treatment, by design.
That's the gap that matters for a parent. An age gate, where it exists, can stop a child from breezing past a landing page. It can't tell you what's actually being said in a chat that's built to stay unseen, on an app built for a very different audience than a curious teenager.
What this means practically
If a child has PolyBuzz installed, that's already worth a direct, non-judgmental conversation, not because something has definitely gone wrong, but because the app itself says it isn't meant for them. Worth asking:
Where did they hear about it?
Do they know it's built for adults?
Would they be comfortable showing you a conversation?
Halo Aware's browser extension supports PolyBuzz, alongside 11 other AI chat and companion platforms, so if PolyBuzz is already part of your household's AI use, you don't have to rely on a birthdate box to know what's happening. You get the topic summaries and the alerts if something concerning comes up, without reading everything your child types.
