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22 September 2026 · 2 min read

Former Google Safety Chief Warns AI May Pose a Deeper Threat to Children Than Social Media

Tom Siegel, who founded Google's trust and safety team, has called for a slowdown in AI development, warning that the industry is repeating the mistakes of the social media era with children. He cites risks ranging from suicide and psychosis to weakened critical thinking, and has joined a new institute to assess children's use of AI.

Tom Siegel, the former vice president of trust and safety at Alphabet's Google, this week called for a slowdown in the development of artificial intelligence, warning that the technology industry risks repeating the mistakes of the social media era, potentially causing even greater harm to children. Speaking to Reuters, he said the belief that the industry will address these problems by itself, without outside help, is unrealistic.

Siegel has joined Common Sense Media, a children's online advocacy group established in 2003 that researches and reviews media suitability for children. He will serve as the first executive director of its Youth AI Safety Institute, a research organisation launched in May to assess children's use of AI. Anthropic and the OpenAI Foundation are among the institute's backers.

According to Siegel, major AI companies are rolling out features to children without establishing sufficient guardrails. He pointed to a range of possible harms and suggested that companies could take immediate steps to better protect young people:

  • Suicide and psychosis linked to interactions with chatbots.
  • Cognitive offloading, meaning decreased critical thinking caused by relying on AI to answer questions.
  • Weak age verification that allows underage children to access chatbots.

He proposed stronger age verification measures and options allowing users to turn off AI features in search. A Google spokesman said parents have controls to turn off a child's access to the search engine entirely and described its AI search features as useful for learning. An OpenAI spokesperson said the company uses account and behavioural signals alongside self-reported age to identify underage users, while acknowledging that no single method is perfect. A priority for Siegel is developing independent standards, similar to car crash testing, to measure the risk of publicly available AI tools.

This development is reported by Reuters (via Yahoo News), available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/ex-google-safety-chief-warns-173248169.html.

Sources