What parental controls does Character.AI actually have?
The short answer
Character.AI now has two real safety layers: Parental Insights, a weekly email report your teen can send you, and an under-18 experience with open-ended chat removed entirely, rolling out since November 2025. Both are worth switching on, and both are genuinely limited: the report never includes what was said, and the teen protections only reach accounts the platform knows belong to teens.
So treat the native controls as a floor, not an answer. Set them up, then decide how you'll see the thing they deliberately leave out, which is what your child actually talks about.
Parental Insights: the weekly report
Parental Insights, added in March 2025, lets an under-18 user add a parent or guardian's email address to their account. You then get a weekly activity report covering how much time they spent and which Characters they talked to most. It's worth having, and its two limits are stated by the company itself: the report does not include chat content, and it is switched on from your child's account, not yours. There is no parent dashboard to claim; it starts with a conversation and their consent.
The under-18 changes since November 2025
In late October 2025 Character.AI announced it would remove open-ended chat for under-18 users altogether, after news reports and questions from regulators about how open-ended AI chat affects teens. The removal began in the US on 24 November 2025 with other markets following, and the under-18 experience was rebuilt around non-chat creative features instead: feeds, image and video tools, story formats. Age is enforced by what the company calls age assurance, an in-house model combined with third-party verification from Persona.
The pressure behind the change was real: US families brought lawsuits following cases involving teenagers, and in January 2026 news reports said Character.AI and Google had agreed to settle several of them. This is the platform on which our published assessment scored Character.AI 46 out of 100, supervision advised.
The gap: accounts the platform thinks are adult
Every teen protection hangs off the age the platform believes. An account created with an adult date of birth, or one that passes the age checks, gets the full adult product: open-ended chat, no time limits, and no Parental Insights. So before trusting the new restrictions, check which experience your child's account actually gets; the age on the account is the control that matters most.
Whatever the account age, Character.AI's privacy policy (effective July 2026) lists chat communications among the content it collects and names training its AI models among the uses. We found no conversation-training opt-out stated in the policy itself.
What to actually set up
The practical checklist is short:
- Make sure the account carries your child's real date of birth. Every protection in the sections above attaches to it.
- Ask your child to add your email to Parental Insights from their account settings, and talk about why. The weekly report only exists if they set it up.
- Use device-level screen time (Screen Time on iPhone, Family Link on Android) for the how-long question. Those tools see nothing of the content, but they still bound the 11pm marathon sessions.
- Then decide how you'll handle the content question, because nothing above answers it.
Where Halo Aware fits
Halo Aware covers the layer Character.AI's own controls leave out. It's one of the twelve platforms we monitor from the browser on a computer, and you see what the conversations are about as topic summaries, with alerts tuned to the risk this platform actually carries: emotional dependency and attachment, not just shocking words. Never transcripts, and your child knows it's there.
The report Parental Insights won't send you
Paid plans monitor Character.AI and the other companion apps most tools ignore. Topic summaries and dependency-pattern alerts, never transcripts.