Every generation encounters a technology that changes how they learn, work, and interact in society. For the previous generation or two, it was the internet. For today’s young people, it is increasingly AI.
Millions of children and teenagers are already using AI to study, explore interests, solve problems, and make sense of the world around them. They are not adopting AI as adults in the workplace. They are growing up with it.
This creates both an extraordinary opportunity and a shared responsibility. AI has the potential to expand access to learning, creativity, and expertise in ways that were previously unimaginable. However, it also raises an urgent question: How can parents, educators, policymakers, and technology companies build the safeguards, support systems, and trust needed to ensure young people benefit from these tools safely and responsibly?
The opportunity is real. AI can help a student who is hesitant to raise a hand ask questions privately. It can help a teenager work through confusion at their own pace, often in their own language. It can help teachers adapt one lesson for different levels of understanding. In a country like India, where access to knowledge can change the trajectory of a life, that promise is especially significant.
But that promise will only be realised if safety keeps pace with use.
History offers a useful guide. Transformative technologies scale best when the protections around them scale too. Electricity became widely trusted because societies built standards, insulation, and circuit breakers around it. Cars became safer because protections such as seat belts, licensing, and traffic rules became part of the system. Over time, the most important safeguards shift from being optional to default.
AI is entering a similar phase, wherein the usefulness of the technology is well-established, but the opportunity is to build meaningful safeguards early and well enough for people to use these systems with confidence.
That requires a clearer framework than the public debate offers. Much of the conversation still swings between hype and fear. One view assumes the market will sort everything out and young people will adapt on their own. Another assumes the only safe answer is to keep children away from AI altogether. The first understates the risks. The second ignores reality. Young people are already using these tools. As an industry, we have to make that access safer, more age-appropriate, and more responsible.
First, it starts with companies like ours, where safety is not simply a feature added later. It is built into these systems from the outset, with initiatives such as the Teen Safety Blueprint. For younger users, that means stronger defaults, clearer boundaries, better detection of higher-risk situations, and experiences designed with well-being in mind. It also means recognising a basic principle: When privacy, freedom, and safety come into tension for younger users, safety should carry special weight.
More broadly, the burden cannot fall solely on parents to reverse-engineer risk, or on teenagers to navigate a powerful technology alone.
Second, parent agency matters. One of the clearest lessons of the social media era is that platforms moved quickly for most parents to keep pace with. With a fast-moving technology like AI, parents need guidance they can use, controls they can understand, and enough visibility to help shape how these tools are used at home.
Third, teachers and schools need to be treated as central actors. Because many young people are using AI for learning, classrooms are where both the upside and the risks will appear first. Teachers need support that reflects classroom reality: Practical training, responsible-use frameworks, and guidance on academic integrity, critical thinking, and digital literacy. The aim for educational institutions should be to identify ways in which AI can strengthen learning rather than shortcut it.
Fourth, policymakers should consider frameworks that help build public trust. The lesson from earlier technologies is that adoption works best when the rules are clear. In AI, that means age-appropriate standards, accountability for high-risk failures, clarity around data practices, and ongoing input from educators, child-safety experts, families, and young people themselves.
India stands at a unique moment. Its demographic dividend, entrepreneurial energy, and digital public infrastructure give it an opportunity to ensure that AI expands opportunity at an unprecedented scale. As the country works toward the vision of an Atmanirbhar Bharat, AI can help unlock productivity, widen access to knowledge, and empower a new generation of students, workers, and entrepreneurs. But realising that opportunity will require more than widespread adoption. It will require ensuring that access is accompanied by safety, trust, and the skills needed to use AI effectively and responsibly.
That is the challenge in front of us. Not whether AI will be powerful or enough people will use it, but how quickly companies, schools, parents, and policymakers can build the safeguards and support systems around it.
The writer is Head of Strategy & Government Affairs, OpenAI, India
Young people are already using these tools. As an industry, we have to make that access safer, more age-appropriate, and more responsible. 
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