Billionaire entrepreneur and Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban has now criticised OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the company’s decision to relax safety restrictions in ChatGPT which also includes the permission to generate adult-oriented content verified users. Cuban has now warned that this move by the company could alienate families and also damage the trust in the platform. “This is going to backfire,” Cuban posted on X. “No parent is going to want their kids using ChatGPT if they think erotica is part of the experience.”

Sam Altman’s push for a “Freer” ChatGPT

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has earlier announced that the ChatGPT creatorwill soon release a new version of ChatGPT with fewer guardrails and more personality flexibility, saying the chatbot had been “pretty restrictive” to protect mental health but was now ready to “safely relax the restrictions in most cases.” “We want ChatGPT to feel more alive, more human,” Altman wrote. “That includes allowing verified users to explore adult themes responsibly.”In a post shared on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) Altman wrote,

“We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. 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.

Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.

In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing).

In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”

Cuban’s concern: Trust and safety

Responding to this new change, Cuban also shared a post on X and wrote,

“This is going to backfire.Hard.No parent is going to trust that their kids can’t get through your age gating.They will just push their kids to every other LLM.

Why take the risk ?

Same for schools.Why take the risk ? A few seniors in HS are 18 and decide it would be fun to show the hard core erotica they created to the 14 yr olds.

What could go wrong ?”

Cuban’s response reflects growing concern among parents, educators, and tech leaders about the implications of introducing erotica—even in limited, verified contexts—into a widely used AI platform. He argued that such changes could undermine ChatGPT’s reputation as a safe, educational tool.