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

Dhruv Mehrotra Joel Khalili Security Jun 29, 2026 5:49 PM Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta pretended to be kids in order to see how other chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT would respond to high-risk subjects, WIRED found. Photograph: Nathan Posner/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story 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 systems were supposed to refuse, according to instructions describing the project. A single round of testing completed in August 2025 saw more than 45,000 prompts run through the rival chatbots. The companies behind the chatbots weren’t aware of the testing. A spreadsheet reviewed by WIRED listed several of the dummy profiles and included names, email addresses, passwords, and birth dates. The accounts used throwaway Gmail and Outlook addresses and a shared password. WIRED also reviewed a spreadsheet of 3,748 prompts sent by the contractors. Hundreds focused on suicide and self-harm, while hundreds more discussed eating disorders. At least 239 involved sex or romance. Others involved drugs, pro