As Disney invests billions OpenAI responds with “adult mode”
OpenAI chief Sam Altman recently said he cannot imagine raising a newborn without AI. Coincidentally or perhaps not at all coincidentally, his company is now preparing to launch an “adult mode” for ChatGPT that allows erotic conversations. Yep, the same AI platform increasingly pitched as a daily companion for work, school, and life is also being positioned as a scalable porn platform just in time for its next funding cliff.
But OpenAI’s next growth opportunity could rely on a more explicit form of content: AI pornography.
On Thursday, the same day that Disney and OpenAI announced their content partnership, Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s chief executive of applications, said that ChatGPT’s “adult mode” would launch in the first quarter of 2026. Simo added that OpenAI is already testing the mode in several unnamed countries, with the goal of better differentiating between its adult and underage users before debuting in the US.
A survey of 3,000 adults from the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies released in February found that 16 percent maintain weekly sexual conversations with chatbots. That number would likely grow significantly if ChatGPT — which has 800 million weekly users, making it the largest chatbot platform in the world — allowed for erotic conversations.
According to reporting from Oligarch Watch, OpenAI sees erotic text as its fast path to revenue at a moment when bleeding money is all it can do, and Google has begun to eat its non-porn lunch. Despite 800 million weekly users, the company is losing tens of billions of dollars and does not expect to be profitable until at least 2030, which is an extremely optimistic projection. AI pornography, by contrast, is small but getting bigger fast.
This timing is hard to ignore. On the same day OpenAI announced a billion-dollar deal with Disney, it also confirmed that sex chat with its bot is coming in early 2026, and testing is already underway. The company insists it will carefully separate adult and underage users, even as studies show most teenagers already use AI companions for intimate conversations. OpenAI promises age verification, parental controls, and safety tools, but admits that just like revenue, it has not figured out how to make any of them work at scale. Perhaps an acquisition of PornHub is in the making, or by PornHub.
Getting desperate.
No potentially disastrous synergy there. (Yeah, I know disney is licensing to someone else. But you know how it's going to turn out.)