Three assistants set three different ages for the same task

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A parent deciding whether a teenager can use a chatbot for homework help is not asking one question but three, because the major assistants do not set the same rule. The task is comparing what each vendor's own terms and help pages state as retrieved on 16 September 2026, since these are living documents that change without an announcement to most users.

What the documents say

OpenAI's Terms of Use state a minimum age of '13 years old or the minimum age required in your country to consent to use the Services,' adding that anyone under 18 'must have your parent or legal guardian's permission.' Anthropic's Consumer Terms set a higher, flatter bar: a user 'must be at least 18 years old or the minimum age required to consent to use the Services in your location, whichever is higher,' with no stated path for a younger user even with parental permission. Google takes a third structure: its Gemini Apps guide for parents describes access for children under 13, or the applicable age in their country, only through Google Family Link, which a parent must actively enable, layering on content filters plus a block on Gemini 'claiming to be a person or having human emotions' for supervised accounts. None of the three states an enforcement mechanism beyond a self-reported birth date or, for Google's under-13 path, a parent-managed account.

Check this

A reader can check two things: which age threshold applies, since 13, 18, and a Family-Link-gated under-13 path are three different answers, and whether that threshold is self-declared at signup or verified by a linked account system. For Google specifically, the guide names concrete settings, such as disabled voice match and disabled activity retention for supervised under-13 accounts, that a parent can confirm are actually turned on, rather than assuming a family setup did so automatically.

What holds and what fails

Each policy holds as a description of what the current terms say a household should do; none of the three describes a robust way to verify a stated age beyond a family-supervision account structure. The gap is largest for OpenAI's under-18 category, where 'parent or legal guardian's permission' is not paired, in the cited terms, with any described verification step. A stated permission requirement is not the same as a checked one. Readers should also expect these figures to move; terms pages change without notice to existing users.

• Check the current minimum age and any parental-permission language in the terms of the specific assistant your household uses.
• For a child under a platform's independent-use age, enable a supervised-account structure like Family Link rather than a standard account.
• Recheck these terms periodically, since age and consent language can change between visits.

The three approaches compared here are not equally strict or enforced; the useful habit is reading the specific document for the specific tool in front of you, rather than assuming one company's rule applies to all of them.