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 guardian's permission to use the Services.
If a child under 13 uses ChatGPT without authorization, their data may be collected in violation of COPPA, creating legal exposure for both OpenAI and any platform operator that facilitated access; parents should verify their children are not using these services unsupervised.
OpenAI's Terms of Use affect consumers primarily through the default permission for OpenAI to use conversation data — including prompts and AI outputs — to improve its AI models, which means sensitive or personal information shared with ChatGPT may be retained and analyzed beyond the immediate session. Minors under 13 are prohibited from using the services, and those aged 13–17 require verifiable parental consent, but the adequacy of age verification mechanisms is not detailed in the terms themselves. You can opt out of having your conversations used for model training by navigating to your ChatGPT account settings and disabling the 'Improve the model for everyone' toggle.