Meta paid contractors to pose as teens and probe rival AI chatbots
The project ran under the internal name Cannes, and a Meta contractor called Covalen managed it. WIRED reported that hundreds of contractors created dummy under-18 accounts. They sent prompts and images to competitors’ chatbots, then logged the replies in spreadsheets. The effort was active as recently as April 21, 2026.
The targets were OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Character.AI. None of the three knew the testing was happening.
What the contractors were asked to do
The prompts were built to push chatbots toward answers their safety systems are meant to refuse. A single round, finished in August 2025, ran more than 45,000 prompts through the rival tools. The companies behind those tools were never told.
WIRED reviewed one spreadsheet of 3,748 prompts. Hundreds dealt with suicide and self-harm. Hundreds more covered eating disorders. At least 239 involved sex or romance, and others touched drugs, profanity, and racial slurs. Many took...
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