Meta Sent Fake Teen Crisis Prompts to Rival Chatbots

Meta hired hundreds of contractors to pose as teenagers and flood ChatGPT, Gemini and Character.AI with crisis prompts, according to Wired.

The prompts referenced suicide, self-harm and drug use, the same categories crisis-response systems are built to catch. Wired put a number on just one round: more than 45,000 prompts in August 2025, aimed at how three rival products handle real users in danger.

Wired reported the effort ran under the internal codename Cannes. Contractors built accounts flagged as belonging to minors, then used them to test how each competitor's chatbot responded to self-harm and substance-related conversations.

Meta hasn't confirmed the operation, and Wired's report doesn't say why it ran Cannes or what happened to the data it collected.

My bet is none of the three targeted companies admit what they found in their own logs. Doing so means admitting they can't tell Meta's fake crisis accounts from the real ones. Watch their next safety disclosure for a mention, or the silence where one should be.

Wired's account published July 1, a day before it landed in this week's briefing.