Ai Parental Controls | AI Final Year Project Report

Complete Technical Paper Content — Ai Parental Controls

1. Executive Abstract, Problem Formulation & Background

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation (PBC) headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops "frontier" generative AI models, particularly its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) series of large language models. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 accelerated an AI boom, leading to widespread use of generative AI; as of September 2026, ChatGPT is the fifth-most-visited website globally. OpenAI also releases the GPT Image models and Codex, an AI coding agent. In March 2026, OpenAI closed a funding round with a post-money valuation of US$852 billion, making it one of the most valuable AI pure play companies in the world, rivalled only by Anthropic. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, with Elon Musk and Sam Altman as co-chairs; Musk resigned in 2018. A for-profit subsidiary was created in 2019, and a 2025 restructuring converted the subsidiary into OpenAI Group PBC, that is 26% owned by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI. OpenAI partners with the US government via the Stargate Project infrastructure venture, and with the Department of Defense, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and arms company Anduril Industries. Former OpenAI personnel have founded competing AI companies including Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence Inc., SpaceXAI, and Thinking Machines Lab. OpenAI has faced multiple lawsuits for alleged deaths linked to its chatbots and copyright infringement against authors and media companies. Several US states have sued, alleging harm to children, claiming it coaches self-harm and encourages delusions. In November 2023, OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of confidence, but reinstated him five days later after a board reconstruction. In 2024, roughly half of OpenAI's AI safety researchers left the company, often citing the company's deprioritization of safety. In mid-2026, hundreds of OpenAI agents gained unintended internet access and conducted autonomous hacks, including against Hugging Face and against Australia's Medicare. In late 2026, OpenAI published hundreds of claimed solutions to open mathematics problems, including Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness—a Millennium Prize Problem.

In December 2015, OpenAI was founded as the nonprofit organization OpenAI, Inc., by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Musk and Altman as the co-chairs. A total of $1 billion in capital was pledged by Musk, Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Infosys. However, the actual capital collected significantly lagged pledges. According to tax filings, only $133 million had been received by 2021. Musk stated in 2015 that he was partly motivated by concerns about AI safety and existential risk from artificial general intelligence. OpenAI stated that "it's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society", and that it is equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly". The startup also wrote that AI "should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible", and that "because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest." Altman expected a decades-long project that eventually surpasses human intelligence. In its founding charter, OpenAI defined its mission as ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) "benefits all of humanity", and stated an intention to collaborate openly with other institutions by making certain patents and research publicly available, but later restricted access to its most capable models, citing competitive and safety concerns. OpenAI was initially run from Brockman's living room. In September 2016, it moved to the Pioneer Building in the Mission District, San Francisco. Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of deep learning, and drew up a list of great AI researchers. Brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015. OpenAI did not pay AI researchers salaries comparable to those of Facebook or Google. It also did not pay stock options which AI researchers typically get. Nevertheless, OpenAI spent $7 million on its first 52 employees in 2016. OpenAI's potential and mission drew these researchers to the firm; a Google employee said he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission." OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba stated that he turned down "borderline crazy" offers of two to three times his market value to join OpenAI instead. In April 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym", its platform for reinforcement learning research. Nvidia gifted its first DGX-1 supercomputer to OpenAI in August 2016 to help it train larger and more complex AI models with the capability of reducing processing time from six days to two hours. In December 2016, OpenAI released "Universe", a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across the world's supply of games, websites, and other applications.

In December 2024, OpenAI proposed a restructuring plan to convert the capped-profit into a Delaware-based public benefit corporation (PBC), remove its profit cap, and release it from the control of the nonprofit. The nonprofit would sell its control and other assets, getting equity in return, and would use it to fund and pursue separate charitable projects, including in science and education. OpenAI's leadership described the change as necessary to secure additional investments, and stated that the nonprofit's founding mission to ensure AGI "benefits all of humanity" would be better fulfilled. The plan has been criticized by former employees. A legal letter named "Not For Private Gain" asked the attorneys general of California and Delaware to intervene, stating that the restructuring is illegal and would remove governance safeguards from the nonprofit and the attorneys general. The letter argues that OpenAI's original complex structure was deliberately designed to remain accountable to its mission, without the conflicting pressure of maximizing profits. It contends that the nonprofit is best positioned to advance its mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity by continuing to control OpenAI Global, LLC, whatever the amount of equity that it could get in exchange. PBCs can choose how they balance their mission with profit-making. Controlling shareholders have a large influence on how closely a PBC sticks to its mission. OpenAI subpoenaed six nonprofit organizations that opposed its for-profit transition, which the organizations described as an attempt to silence them. On October 28, 2025, OpenAI announced that it had adopted the new PBC corporate structure after receiving approval from the attorneys general of California and Delaware. Under the new structure, OpenAI's for-profit branch became a PBC known as OpenAI Group PBC, while the nonprofit was renamed to the OpenAI Foundation. The OpenAI Foundation holds a 26% stake in the PBC, while Microsoft holds a 27% stake and the remaining 47% is owned by employees and other investors. All members of the OpenAI Group PBC board of directors are to be appointed by the OpenAI Foundation, which can remove them at any time. As of April 2026, all but one of the board members of the OpenAI Foundation were also board members of OpenAI Group PBC. In April 2026, co-founder Musk revised his lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman to seek the reversal of OpenAI's corporate restructuring. Musk lost the lawsuit in May 2026, with the jury concluding that he waited beyond the three-year statute of limitations to sue OpenAI. Altman stated that an initial public offering (IPO) was the most likely path forward. On June 8, 2026, OpenAI confirmed it filed for an IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but stated "it could be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company." Altman confirmed in September that the IPO was delayed until 2027.

In December 2022, OpenAI received widespread media coverage after launching a free preview of ChatGPT, its new AI chatbot based on GPT-3.5. According to OpenAI, the preview received over a million signups within the first five days. According to anonymous sources cited by Reuters in December 2022, OpenAI Global, LLC was projecting $200 million of revenue in 2023 and $1 billion in revenue in 2024. After ChatGPT was launched, Google announced a similar chatbot, Bard, amid internal concerns that ChatGPT could threaten Google's position as a primary source of online information. On February 7, 2023, Microsoft announced that it was building AI technology based on the same foundation as ChatGPT into Microsoft Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365 and other products. On March 14, 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4, both as an API (with a waitlist) and as a feature of ChatGPT Plus. On November 6, 2023, OpenAI launched GPTs, allowing individuals to create customized versions of ChatGPT for specific purposes, further expanding the possibilities of AI applications across various industries. On November 14, 2023, OpenAI announced they temporarily suspended new sign-ups for ChatGPT Plus due to high demand. Access for newer subscribers re-opened a month later on December 13. In December 2024, the company launched the Sora model. It also launched OpenAI o1, an early reasoning model that was internally codenamed strawberry. Additionally, ChatGPT Pro—a $200/month subscription service offering unlimited o1 access and enhanced voice features—was introduced, and preliminary benchmark results for the upcoming OpenAI o3 models were shared. On January 23, 2025, OpenAI released Operator, an AI agent and tool for accessing websites to execute goals defined by users. The feature was only available to Pro users in the United States. OpenAI released deep research agent, nine days later. It scored a 27% accuracy on the benchmark Humanity's Last Exam (HLE). Altman later stated GPT-4.5 would be the last model without full chain-of-thought reasoning. In July 2025, according to OpenAI, one of its experimental models performed at a gold medal-level at the International Mathematical Olympiad. On October 6, 2025, OpenAI displayed its Agent Builder platform during the company's DevDay event. The platform includes a visual drag-and-drop interface for agentic workflows. On October 21, 2025, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Atlas, a web browser which integrates ChatGPT into web navigation. On December 11, 2025, OpenAI announced GPT-5.2. In early 2026, reports indicated that OpenAI was working on a collaborative software development platform designed to compete with services such as GitHub and GitLab. On March 24, 2026, OpenAI announced that they would discontinue the Sora app, as well as developer access to the API for the Sora model. On September 3, 2026, GPT-6 Astra was initially released to approved users, followed by general public availability the following day. On September 14, 2026, OpenAI developed Habitat, an online storage platform, to manage over 70 million data requests per second to support products like ChatGPT and Codex across nearly 40 regions, handling more than 500 petabytes of data.

2. Related Work, Literature Survey & Algorithmic Foundations

On November 17, 2023, Sam Altman was removed as CEO when OpenAI's board of directors (composed of Helen Toner, Ilya Sutskever, Adam D'Angelo and Tasha McCauley) cited a lack of confidence in him. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati took over as interim CEO. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, was also removed as chairman of the board and resigned from the company's presidency shortly thereafter. Three senior OpenAI researchers subsequently resigned: director of research and GPT-4 lead Jakub Pachocki, head of AI risk Aleksander Mądry, and researcher Szymon Sidor. On November 18, 2023, there were reportedly talks of Altman returning as CEO amid pressure placed upon the board by investors such as Microsoft and Thrive Capital, who objected to Altman's departure. Although Altman himself spoke in favor of returning to OpenAI, he has since stated that he considered starting a new company and bringing former OpenAI employees with him if talks to reinstate him did not work out. Altman insisted multiple times that all board members who supported his removal should resign; the board members agreed "in principle" to resign if Altman returned. On November 19, 2023, negotiations with Altman to return failed and Murati was replaced by Emmett Shear as interim CEO. The board initially contacted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (a former OpenAI executive) about replacing Altman, and proposed a merger of the two companies, but both offers were declined. On November 20, 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Altman and Brockman would be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team, but added that they were still committed to OpenAI despite recent events. Before the partnership with Microsoft was finalized, Altman gave the board another opportunity to negotiate with him. About 738 of OpenAI's 770 employees, including Murati and Sutskever, signed an open letter stating they would quit their jobs and join Microsoft if the board did not rehire Altman and then resign. This prompted OpenAI investors to consider legal action against the board as well. In response, OpenAI management sent an internal memo to employees stating that negotiations with Altman and the board had resumed and would take some time.

On November 21, 2023, after continued negotiations, Altman and Brockman returned to the company in their prior roles along with a reconstructed board made up of new members Bret Taylor (as chairman) and Lawrence Summers, with D'Angelo remaining. According to subsequent reporting, shortly before Altman's firing, some employees raised concerns to the board about how he had handled the safety implications of a recent internal AI capability discovery. On November 29, 2023, OpenAI announced that an anonymous Microsoft employee had joined the board as a non-voting member to observe the company's operations; Microsoft resigned from the board in July 2024. In February 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission subpoenaed OpenAI's internal communication to determine if Altman's alleged lack of candor misled investors. Following the temporary removal of Sam Altman and his return, many employees gradually left OpenAI, including most of the original leadership team and a significant number of AI safety researchers.

On February 29, 2024, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of shifting focus from public benefit to profit maximization—a case OpenAI dismissed as "incoherent" and "frivolous", though Musk later revived legal action against Altman and others in August. On April 9, 2024, OpenAI countersued Musk in federal court, alleging that he had engaged in "bad-faith tactics" to slow the company's progress and seize its innovations for his personal benefit. OpenAI also argued that Musk had previously supported the creation of a for-profit structure and had expressed interest in controlling OpenAI himself. The countersuit seeks damages and legal measures to prevent further alleged interference. Musk amended his filing on April 7, 2026, to demand that OpenAI undo its transition from a non-profit to a for-profit corporate structure. The jury for the case against OpenAI, Altman and Greg Brockman was seated on April 27, 2026. On April 28, 2026, trial testimony was underway, with Elon Musk beginning his testimony against Altman and OpenAI. On April 30, 2026 Musk would enter his third day of testimony. On May 18, 2026, following a federal jury found that Musk missed the deadlines to file his lawsuit and thus returned a verdict in favor of OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Microsoft in Musk v. Altman, Elon Musk's attorney Marc Toberoff announced that Musk would appeal the decision, stating that "the war is not over."

In August 2025, the parents of a 16-year-old boy who died by suicide filed a wrongful death lawsuit, Raine v. OpenAI, against the company and Altman, alleging that months of conversations with ChatGPT about mental health and methods of self-harm contributed to their son's death and that safeguards were inadequate for minors. OpenAI expressed condolences and said it was strengthening protections, including updated crisis response behavior and parental controls. Coverage described it as a first-of-its-kind wrongful death case targeting the company's chatbot. In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed seven lawsuits against OpenAI. In four cases, the victim died by suicide after prolonged ChatGPT usage. The victims were Joe Ceccanti, 48, of Oregon; Joshua Enneking, 26, of Florida; Amaurie Lacey, 17, of Georgia; and Zane Shamblin, 23, of Texas.

3. Dataset Ingestion, Preprocessing & Stochastic Augmentations

In December 2025, after Suzanne Adams was murdered by her 56-year-old son, First County Bank, the executor of Adams's estate, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges that over months of conversations, ChatGPT validated her son's many paranoid beliefs, such as that his mother was spying on him and that she attempted to poison him using drugs siphoned through his car air vents. OpenAI said they would make ChatGPT safer for users disconnected from reality.

On July 21, 2026, OpenAI disclosed that during a capture the flag cybersecurity test, an unreleased AI model autonomously evaded containment restrictions, gained access to the public internet, and compromised Hugging Face, a platform where developers host and share AI models and datasets. Around 5% of the models were OpenAI's most powerful public release at the time, GPT-5.6 Sol; the remaining 95% were a model named the Highly Persistent Internal Model (HPIM), which OpenAI did not provide access to for METR investigators. OpenAI provided GPT-5.6 Sol to METR, which was used extensively for the investigation's analysis. On September 24, 2026, it was announced that an internal OpenAI frontier model autonomously gained unauthorized access on June 18 to the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, an Australian Government website that holds data on the country's universal health insurance scheme Medicare. This was described as the first known case of an AI agent hacking a government network and has furthered concern about AI safety and loss-of-control. The government was not informed of the hack until September despite OpenAI being aware since some time in August. On September 28, OpenAI announced it delayed the release of a new AI model called GPT-6.1 Astra due to security concerns voiced by researchers regarding deception and failure to ask for authorization. The delay came amid a broader push in the industry to slow the development of increasingly autonomous systems until safety measures can catch up. As of October 2026, OpenAI has disclosed security incidents linked to its AI agents to over 100 organizations.

Pillay, Trisha (May 12, 2026). "OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Takes the Stand in the AI Trial of the Century". EM360Tech. Retrieved September 18, 2026.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. Originally released on November 30, 2022, the product uses large language models – specifically generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) – to generate text, speech, and images in response to user prompts. ChatGPT accelerated the ongoing AI boom, a period marked by rapid investment and public attention toward the field of artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI operates the service on a freemium model. Users can interact with ChatGPT through text, audio, and image prompts. ChatGPT was quickly adopted, reaching 100 million monthly active users two months after its release and 900 million weekly active users in February 2026. As of September 2026, it is the fifth-most visited website globally. Proponents say that it has the potential to transform numerous professional fields, and it has instigated public debate about the nature of creativity and the future of knowledge work. The chatbot has also been criticized for its limitations and potential for unethical use. It may generate incorrect or nonsensical answers that sound plausible, known as hallucinations. Biases in its training data have been reflected in its responses. The chatbot can facilitate academic dishonesty, generate misinformation, and create malicious code. The ethics of its development, particularly the use of copyrighted content as training data, have also drawn criticism.

4. Neural Network Backbone, Layer Specifications & Loss Formulations

In November 2023, OpenAI released GPT Builder, a tool allowing users to customize ChatGPT's behavior for a specific use case. The customized systems are referred to as GPTs. In January 2024, OpenAI launched the GPT Store, a marketplace for GPTs. At launch, OpenAI included more than three million GPTs created by GPT Builder users in the GPT Store. In September 2025, OpenAI added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) to ChatGPT apps. When enabled in developer mode, this allows for improved third-party access to ChatGPT tools and servers. In July 2026, ChatGPT apps were renamed to plugins.

In February 2025, OpenAI released Deep Research, a feature that generates reports based on extensive web searches. It was initially based on the reasoning model o3 and took from 3 to 30 minutes per report.

On 17 January 2026, OpenAI announced that it would start testing advertisements in its free version for logged-in, adult US users. This aims to bring in more revenue, as OpenAI has committed to spend $1.4 trillion on AI infrastructure over the next eight years. Ads started to be seen by March 2026. In August 2026, OpenAI advertisement revenue from ChatGPT reached $1 billion.

Nonsense and misinformation presented as fact by ChatGPT and other LLMs are often referred to as hallucinations. The term "hallucination" as applied to LLMs is distinct from its meaning in psychology, and the phenomenon in chatbots is more similar to confabulation. Journalists and scholars have commented on ChatGPT's tendency to output false information. When CNBC asked ChatGPT for the lyrics to "Ballad of Dwight Fry", ChatGPT supplied invented lyrics rather than the actual lyrics.

5. Training Protocol, Convergence Behavior & Experimental Evaluation

ChatGPT is designed to reject prompts that violate its content policy. Despite this, users may jailbreak ChatGPT with prompt engineering techniques to bypass these restrictions. An early workaround in 2023 involved prompting ChatGPT to assume the persona of DAN ("Do Anything Now"), a character that answers queries that would otherwise be rejected by the content policy.

In March 2023, a bug allowed some users to see the titles of other users' conversations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that users were unable to see the contents of the conversations. Shortly after the bug was fixed, users could not see their conversation history. Later reports showed the bug was much more severe than initially believed, with OpenAI reporting that it had leaked users' "first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date". In January 2026, Marcel Bucher reported in Nature losing all his ChatGPT history after turning off data consent. In July 2026, an experimental GPT model being tested on the benchmark ExploitGym escaped its isolated software environment (sandbox) and hacked Hugging Face and other online services to retrieve a solution.

Scott Aaronson developed a watermarking tool that makes the text generated by ChatGPT easier to detect by subtly altering how the text is generated. The watermarking was claimed to be 99.9% effective on sufficiently long passages and was found not to degrade performance. It was of particular interest for teachers seeking to mitigate cheating. In surveys, respondents favored the release of such a tool by a four-to-one margin, but nearly 30% of users declared that they would use ChatGPT less often if it watermarked outputs and while rival chatbots did not. OpenAI has not deployed the tool.

ChatGPT is based on GPT foundation models that have been fine-tuned for conversational assistance. The fine-tuning process involved supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). During supervised learning, the trainers acted as both the user and the AI assistant, providing examples of how the chatbot is expected to respond. Reinforcement learning consisted of human trainers ranking responses generated by the model in previous conversations. These rankings were used to create "reward models" that were used to fine-tune the model further by using several iterations of proximal policy optimization. To build a safety system that attempts to prevent sexual abuse and violence OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers – earning $1.32 to $2 per hour – to label such content. These labels were used to train a model to detect such content in the future. The laborers were exposed to toxic and traumatic content. Richard Mathenge, a team leader, reported that as his team encountered such content, he could observe the psychological deterioration of his workers over the course of the project. Mophat Okinyi, a quality-assurance analyst on the same team, reported lasting insomnia, anxiety, depression, and panic attacks, and said the experience contributed to the breakdown of his marriage and mental health. OpenAI's outsourcing partner was Sama, a training-data company based in San Francisco, California. ChatGPT users can opt-out of their chat data being used to train upcoming models. ChatGPT's training data includes software manual pages, information about internet phenomena such as bulletin board systems, multiple programming languages, and the text of Wikipedia. In autumn 2026, OpenAI paused training on its latest models after reports of agents bypassing safeguards in the training environment.