OpenAI has “indefinitely” abandoned plans to release an erotic chatbot for adults following concerns from employees and investors, the company has confirmed. The Financial Times. Plans for such a feature, first announced in December last year for an October 2025 release, had already been delayed while the company debated whether to release it to everyone. This is the second app that OpenAI has decided to shut down this week, after announcing on Tuesday that it was shutting down its Sora video generator.
The adult-oriented chatbot, reportedly called “Citron Mode”, is now on hold with no planned release date. The company reportedly had difficulty training models that previously avoided sexually explicit material and also removing illegal behavior such as bestiality or incest, two people familiar with the matter said. foot.
Open AI said it wanted to conduct long-term research on the effects of erotic chat and user attachment to AI, and said there was not yet enough “empirical evidence” on the topic. The company also said it wanted to focus on its core productivity tools like the coding assistant and abandon “side quests” like Sora and the erotic chatbot.
The idea of adult features came about when OpenAI announced that it would add parental controls and automatic age detection features to ChatGPT. CEO Sam Altman said in October that the company had always been cautious about such issues over concerns about unhealthy AI attachments, but that it felt it could “safely relax restrictions in most cases.”
However, the adult mode reportedly raised concerns among investors, particularly amid the controversy caused by rival XAI’s Grok model, which generated deepfake nude images of real people and children. Employees are also concerned about this feature, so much so that a senior employee has even left the company over this issue. “AI shouldn’t replace your friends or your family; you have to have human relationships,” he said. foot.
Another challenge is OpenAI’s age-verification technology, which was introduced after lawsuits from families who said ChatGPT had harmed their children. The technology reportedly has a margin of error of over ten percent, which will still give a large number of youth access to the technology. OpenAI said the data is within industry standard limits and that it is continuing to work on its accuracy.
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