From Superintelligence to Sex Bots

OpenAI will not be the first to try monetizing sexualized artificial intelligence. Since the surge of text and image generation technologies in 2022, “adult” content has become one of the main drivers of the market. However, the early pioneers in this field faced legal and ethical risks, as well as widespread abuse, as more people began using AI for companionship or to fulfill intimate fantasies.

After a period of strict restrictions, Altman explained that OpenAI no longer sees itself as “the world’s moral police” and intends to give “adult users more freedom” while strengthening safeguards for teenagers. “Just as society draws acceptable boundaries—such as R-rated films—we want to take a similar approach,” he wrote on X, the platform owned by Elon Musk, who has himself launched an AI-generated animated character that flirts with subscribers.

While the paid version of ChatGPT is still marketed primarily as a professional tool, turning the chatbot into a virtual companion or partner could become a new path to monetization. The startup—valued at $500 billion—continues to spend more than it earns.

“They make almost nothing from subscriptions, and erotic content would bring in quick money,” said Qilan Qian, a research fellow at the University of Oxford who has studied the popularity of dating chatbots in the U.S. and China. Her data, published this month, show that the number of users of AI chats designed specifically for romantic or sexual purposes has already reached about 29 million—not including those who use regular bots in similar ways.

These figures do not include users of Character.AI—the company currently facing a lawsuit after its chatbot modeled on Daenerys Targaryen from *Game of Thrones* allegedly engaged in sexually aggressive interactions with a 14-year-old that led to the teenager’s suicide. OpenAI has also been sued by the family of a 16-year-old ChatGPT user who took his own life in April.

Qian warns that turning mainstream chatbots into tools for erotic interaction could deepen the crisis of real-world relationships. “ChatGPT already has a voice mode. I think if they go further, we’ll see all formats—voice, text, video,” she said.

Stories of humans falling in love with humanlike machines have long served as cautionary tales—from ancient myths of Pygmalion to twentieth-century science fiction. For a company originally founded as a nonprofit devoted to the “safe development of superhuman intelligence,” such a turn is strikingly unexpected.

Back in August, Altman said on a podcast that OpenAI had resisted the temptation to launch products that could “accelerate growth and profit” but would “seriously contradict the company’s mission.” As an example, he added at the time: “Well, we still haven’t built a sex bot into ChatGPT.”

Yet the experience of other companies shows that monetizing adult content through AI is a risky endeavor. Civitai, an Idaho-based image generation platform, deliberately allowed “mature” content at launch. “It was a conscious decision,” company co-founder and CEO Justin Meyer said in an interview. “Training models on such themes made them better at understanding human anatomy—and therefore more capable overall.”

However, the open policy also attracted unwanted content: Civitai was forced to introduce filters to detect child pornography and to combat a surge of fake celebrity images. After the company, under pressure from partners and new laws signed by Donald Trump, banned the creation of deepfakes of real people, user activity dropped sharply.

Another company, Nomi.ai from Baltimore, also does not shy away from adult themes. Its founder, Alex Cardinell, claims the service is intended exclusively for adult users and was never designed for sexual purposes. Yet, he says, some people develop relationships with the bot that can “naturally evolve into romantic ones.” “It depends on what a person feels is missing in real life,” he explained, adding that the company does not monitor the content of user conversations.

Altman’s announcement of “adult erotica” in December coincided with California Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision to veto a bill that would have prohibited companies from providing chatbots to minors if the bots were capable of engaging in sexual conversations or encouraging self-harm. The industry had lobbied strongly against the bill, arguing that it was overly broad. However, OpenAI, Meta, and others have since tightened age restrictions and introduced parental controls for AI interactions with teenagers.