How old do you have to be to use ChatGPT?

You have to be at least 13 to use ChatGPT, and until you turn 18 you need a parent or legal guardian's permission. Both numbers people quote are in OpenAI's terms of use, effective January 1, 2026: 13 is the floor, 18 is where permission stops being needed. Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Grok also start at 13, Character.AI has blocked open ended chat for under 18s since November 25, 2025, and Claude requires every user to be 18. Most add a clause that raises the floor where local law sets a higher age, which in parts of Europe means 14, 15 or 16.

The minimum age for each AI chatbot

These are the consumer terms as each company currently words them. Business, school and developer accounts have their own rules, covered further down.

Most services copy the same 13 and 18 structure, which comes from law rather than from a judgment about what a 13 year old can handle. Claude skips the teen tier outright: Anthropic's terms say you "must be at least 18 years old or the minimum age required to consent to use the Services in your location, whichever is higher", with no permission route for younger users.

Is ChatGPT 13 or 18?

Both answers circulate, and only one is the minimum. The sentence in OpenAI's terms is: "You must be at least 13 years old or the minimum age required in your country to consent to use the Services. If you are under 18 you must have your parent or legal guardian's permission to use the Services." So a 14 year old can hold a ChatGPT account, provided a parent has agreed.

The 18 answer persists because Claude really is 18 only, DeepSeek describes itself as intended for adults, and 18 is the age at which ChatGPT's own behavior changes: users under 18 get what OpenAI calls the ChatGPT for Teens experience, with extra safeguards around sensitive content and some feature limits, and an account only leaves it when ChatGPT determines the user is 18 or older or a verified date of birth shows they have turned 18. It is meant for both, with different defaults.

What the minimum age in your country means

Almost every row carries a version of "or the minimum age required in your country", which is why no single number works everywhere.

In the US, 13 comes from COPPA, the children's privacy rule enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. It protects children under 13 and applies to general audience services that know they are collecting personal information from a child under 13, which requires verifiable parental consent. A floor of 13 keeps a general service outside it.

In the EU, Article 8 of the GDPR sets the age at which a child can consent to an online service processing their data at 16, and lets each country lower it, but not below 13. Below the national age, a parent has to give or authorize consent. The countries chose differently. According to the euCONSENT project's country table, the age is 16 in Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands, 15 in France, 14 in Italy and Spain, and 13 in Belgium and Sweden. In the UK, the UK GDPR sets it at 13, as the Information Commissioner's Office confirms in its guidance on children and online services. If your family's rights over this data are the real question, what you can ask a company to do with your data covers access and deletion requests.

The terms quoted here do not publish country lists, so the national consent age is the best guide to what the clause points at. Character.AI is the exception, spelling out 16 for the EEA and the UK.

How the services check your age

For most of these products the check is a date of birth typed at sign-up. Microsoft's terms, for example, say that if Copilot asks for your birthday and country, you must give real information. Two services now go further.

ChatGPT predicts age. OpenAI began rolling out an age prediction model on its consumer plans in January 2026, and it began reaching the EU on August 25, 2026. The model looks at signals including how long the account has existed, the times of day it is active, usage patterns over time and the age the user gave. OpenAI says that when it is not confident about someone's age it defaults to the safer experience, so the system can move an account into teen mode even if an adult birthdate was entered at sign-up. An adult placed there by mistake can restore full access with a selfie through Persona, an identity verification company, starting from Settings > Account. OpenAI's help page notes that in Italy it may ask for a live selfie, a government ID, or both.

Character.AI checks before it restricts. When it announced the end of open ended chat for under 18s, the company said it had built an age assurance model in house and would combine it with third party tools including Persona. Users it identifies as under 18 lose free conversation with characters.

What parental controls actually show you

The permission the terms ask for is not the same as visibility.

On ChatGPT, a parent can link their account to a teen's. Linking does not give the parent access to the teen's conversations, chat history or real time activity, and either person can unlink at any time. What the parent gets is control over settings: quiet hours when ChatGPT cannot be used, whether the teen's conversations can be used to improve the models, features such as memory, and notifications in limited situations, which OpenAI describes as signs of acute distress. The memory switch matters more than it looks, because what an assistant remembers across conversations builds up into a profile of the child.

On Gemini, a parent uses Google's Family Link app to turn access on or off for a child under 13. For those children the Keep Activity setting is not available, and "Hey Google" and Voice Match do not work with Gemini. Google's help pages add two limits that catch families out: supervised accounts cannot use Gemini at all in the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the UK, and a Family Link managed account still cannot use the Gemini web app, only the mobile app.

On every other service, the protection that does the most is one you set yourself: turning off the switch that lets conversations train future models, after reading what a chatbot does with personal details a child types in.

Where these rules stop

This is a reading of the consumer terms as published, not legal advice. Terms change, which is why the effective dates are in the table; check the current version before relying on any row.

Work and school accounts follow different rules. Google requires users of Gemini with a work account to be 18, while a school account works only if the institution's administrator has enabled the service. Homework rules are a separate question from age, and how to use AI to study without cheating yourself sets out where the line usually falls.

What to do with the answer

1. Under 13. The only route in the terms covered here is a supervised Gemini account through Family Link, and only outside the EEA, Switzerland and the UK. Otherwise, use an assistant together on your own device and account, which is what the setup that works for younger children recommends anyway.
2. 13 to 17. ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Grok are open, with parental permission required by ChatGPT and Grok. Create the account with the real birthdate, link it if the service offers linking, and switch off training. In a country with a higher digital consent age, wait for that age or give consent as the parent.
3. Anyone under 18 who wants Claude. The terms do not allow it at any age below 18, with or without a parent.
4. Choosing between them. If the age rules leave more than one option, the differences that matter in daily use are covered in how to choose an AI assistant.

Then fold these accounts into a family tech setup that prevents most problems: real ages on every account, and a settings review every six months, because several of these terms changed in the past year alone.