Youth AI Safety Institute to Test AI for Youth Safety

https://seattlemedium.com/youth-ai-safety-institute/

Publish Date: 2026-05-05 11:40:00

The Youth AI Safety Institute will be an independent lab to test AI products for risks to kids and teens. (iStock)

By Clare Duffy, CNN

New York (CNN) — Since independent vehicle crash testing began in the mid-1990s, automakers have been incentivized to make safety changes that have saved thousands of lives each year.

Now, a new group is hoping to take a similar approach to artificial intelligence.

Nonprofit media watchdog Common Sense Media is launching the Youth AI Safety Institute, an industry-backed, independent research and testing lab to study the risks AI tools may pose to children and teens. It will aim to provide information to parents and families about various AI tools and set safety benchmarks for tech firms.

AI companies are locked in a race to build the most powerful, widely used models, and that sometimes means speed is prioritized over safety testing. Because AI tools are complex systems with a range of different uses, ranking their safety will likely be far trickier than judging how a car responds in a crash.

But Common Sense Media and the board of top AI, education and health leaders it recruited to oversee the Youth AI Safety Institute believe that solely relying on AI firms to self-police on safety isn’t enough to protect young people. Existing third-party AI safety organizations largely focus on societal-level and existential risks, such as job loss or even human extinction, rather than consumer-friendly safety ratings aimed at everyday use.

The goal is for the public spotlight and third-party standards to spark what Common Sense Media CEO James Steyer called a “race to the top” for tech firms to make safety fixes to improve their standing.

Leading AI firms invest in safety research to “make their models as good as they possibly can, but there’s no independent measure of that,” John Giannandrea, Apple’s former AI strategy chief who joined the institute’s advisory board, told CNN. “We don’t…

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