Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs
Key takeaways
- The effort, which was managed by Meta contractor Covalen, was active as recently as April 21.
- The prompts were often designed to push the chatbots toward responses their safety systems were supposed to refuse, according to instructions describing the project.
- WIRED also reviewed a spreadsheet of 3,748 prompts sent by the contractors.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
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.