Google plans to roll out Gemini next week for children under 13 whose parents use Family Link and says it will not use the under-13 users' data to train its AI
This is what “growth at any cost” looks like: — www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/t... [embedded post] Justin Hendrix / @justinhendrix : “Google plans to roll out its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot next week for children under 13 who have parent-managed Google accounts, as tech companies vie to attract young users with A.I. products.” Paul Rietschka / @prietschka : This is terrible for children, terrible public relations, and terrible product strategy. — I know I'm a ray of sunshine in a dark world, with my constant use of terms like ‘deranged,’ and ‘perverse’ with regard to AI discourse, but the derangement is also happening in corporate product strategy. @pxmorris : I mean if you can't trust AI with your children, who can you trust? [embedded post] @pxmorris : What could go wrong? Josh / @jesteinf : Where can I put money on “actually, Google did use data from children under the age of 13”? [embedded post] @hypervisible : Not a disaster waiting to happen, but a rolling wave of disasters, many of which have already happened. LinkedIn: Dr. Jennifer King : I received one of these emails last week. Note that I'm not being asked whether I'd like to opt my child *in* to using Gemini - I'm being warned that if I don't want it I have to opt-out. … Amber Ivey : 🚨 Big news from Google: Starting next week, the Gemini AI chatbot will be available to kids under 13 through parent-managed accounts. 🚨 … Forums: BeauHD / Slashdot : Google Plans To Roll Out Its AI Chatbot To Children Under 13
Context & Ripple Effects
Children were already encountering AI at school and online, effectively becoming early testers of new products, as earlier coverage of kids' AI exposure documented. At the same time, some parents were beginning to teach chatbot use as a future practical skill, creating demand for supervised access rather than a simple ban-or-open-access choice.
Google's move puts Gemini inside an existing parent-managed account framework while drawing a clear line around using this cohort's data for model training. That makes the launch consequential not just for reach, but for how youth access is governed in a mainstream AI product.
First-order effects
- Families using Family Link gain a Google-managed route for under-13s to access Gemini, with parents becoming the immediate gatekeepers of adoption.
- Google excludes these users' data from AI training, limiting one source of model-improvement data while it expands Gemini's potential user base.
Second-order effects
- Other consumer-AI providers face pressure to offer clearer child-access settings, parental controls and data-use terms if they want to compete for family adoption.
- The distinction between supervised product access and model-training consent becomes a sharper procurement and trust question for parents, schools and child-safety advocates.
Third-order effects
- If major platforms keep extending generative AI to children through family-account systems, age assurance and parental controls could become core product infrastructure rather than a peripheral compliance feature.
- The rollout points toward more segmented AI services: providers may need separate data, safety and experience rules for younger users, though the durability of that model will depend on how regulators and families evaluate it.
The trend: Consumer AI is moving from general availability toward age-tiered access models in which parental controls and data-governance commitments determine who can use the product.