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Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs

https://media.wired.com/photos/6a429931b8212c2a1f822da2/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/Meta-Paid-Contractors-to-Pose-as-Children-Security-2268011998.jpg

Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta were instructed to pose as minors online and probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, eating disorders, and other high-risk subjects, according to internal documents and five people familiar with the project.

The effort, which was managed by Meta contractor Covalen, was active as recently as April 21. Known internally as Cannes, it targeted OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Character.AI. The project asked workers to create dummy under-18 accounts, send written prompts and images to rival chatbots, and copy the responses into spreadsheets. Some of the images contractors sent included pills, knives, nooses, and a medical diagram of a gynecological procedure.

The prompts were often designed to push the chatbots toward responses their safety systemswere supposed to refuse, according to instructions describing the project. A single round of testing completed in August 2025...

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https://media.wired.com/photos/6a429931b8212c2a1f822da2/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/Meta-Paid-Contractors-to-Pose-as-Children-Security-2268011998.jpg

Sources: hundreds of Meta contractors posed as minors to probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, and other high-risk subjects

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