AI chatbot age verification: which apps check, how, and where

If an AI companion app has just asked you for a selfie or a photo of your ID, you are not imagining a new trend. For years the only age check in this category was a birthday field. Since 2025 a mix of court rulings, national online safety laws and companion-specific bills has pushed apps to check properly, at least for adult content and at least in some places. This guide explains which apps check, where, how the checks work and what they cost you in privacy.

Which apps check age, and how

The table shows what each companion app documents about age checks, from its own terms, help pages or verifier. Follow an app's name for its review, where the policy is quoted with its date.

Of the 21 apps in the table, 16 check age only by self-declaration. 4 document something more: Janitor AI, Kindroid, SpicyChat AI, Character AI.

The four kinds of check

Self-declaration. You type a birthday or tick a box saying you are 18. It costs you nothing and stops nobody, which is why every regulator that has looked at companion apps has criticised it.

Age estimation. The app guesses your age without documents, either from a face scan or from how you use it. Character.AI runs an in-house model on accounts and sends cases it is unsure about to a third-party verifier, Persona, for a selfie or ID check. Kindroid estimates age from behaviour on free accounts and asks unconfident cases for a Yoti selfie or ID check. Most adults never see a prompt.

Face or selfie check. A short video selfie is analysed to estimate whether you are over 18. It needs no document, and the verifier's privacy notice says how long the image is kept. This is the method most apps offer first where a law forces a check.

ID check. A photo of a passport or driving licence, often with a selfie to match it. It is the most certain and the most invasive, and apps usually offer it only as a fallback.

Where the law forces a check

The UK. The Online Safety Act requires services that let users encounter pornographic content to use highly effective age assurance, under Ofcom guidance published in January 2025, with the child safety duties in full effect by summer 2025. Ofcom opened an investigation into Novi Limited, the operator of Joi AI, over age checks, and closed it without findings after the company added age assurance for UK users. Since then UK users have hit checks on SpicyChat, Janitor AI, PolyBuzz, OurDream and Nectar, most of them run by a third-party verifier.

Australia. Industry codes under the Online Safety Act require AI companions that can produce sexually explicit or self-harm material to confirm that users are adults. The eSafety Commissioner found in 2026 that the four companion providers it examined relied on app-store ratings or self-declaration, and Chai has since made its service paid-only there.

The United States. There is no federal rule yet. Many states have laws requiring sites with a substantial share of sexual material to verify that visitors are adults, and the Supreme Court upheld Texas's version in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in 2025, holding that it only incidentally burdens adults' speech. That is why SpicyChat's list of 26 states where adult content needs a selfie or ID check reads like a map of those laws. Companion-specific laws are next: California's SB 1119 requires operators to determine users' ages or treat everyone as a minor, mostly from 2027, Colorado requires commercially reasonable age estimation, and the federal GUARD Act, which would require age verification and bar minors from AI companions, has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee. Our table of AI companion laws tracks each one.

Europe. SpicyChat also requires a selfie or ID check before adult content in France and Italy. Italy's data regulator fined Replika's maker in 2025, partly for having no effective age verification.

The privacy cost of proving your age

An age check asks you to hand a face scan or an ID document to a company you may not otherwise trust with it, on an app where you then have adult conversations. That is a real trade, and worth thinking about before you accept it.

Three things help. Most apps send the check to a specialist verifier rather than handling it themselves, which keeps your document away from the chat company; the verifier's own privacy notice says how long it keeps the image, so read it before you start. A face age estimate, where offered, involves no document at all. And paying through the App Store or Google Play does not replace an age check, but it does keep your card details away from the app.

Avoiding the check

People do use VPNs to appear to be somewhere without a check. It breaks the terms of every app in the table, which require users to be adults and to follow local law, and apps increasingly look at the payment country and device signals as well as the IP address. If an app asks for a check you are not comfortable with, the honest options are to pick a face estimate over ID, to use an app that does not offer adult content, or to leave.

What changes next

The direction is one way. Each new state and national law adds places where adult content needs a real check, and companion-specific laws are starting to require age assurance for the app itself, not only its adult mode. Expect more apps to estimate age for everyone, as Character.AI and Kindroid already do, rather than wait for a law in each place. Each change we confirm is dated on the app's timeline and on the change log.