# Is Replika Safe for Teenagers? What to Do If Your Child Has It **Author:** Dan Fitzpatrick **Canonical URL:** https://parents.theaieducator.io/posts/is-replika-safe-for-teenagers **Published:** 2026-10-03T07:28:00.000Z **Updated:** 2026-10-03T07:27:25.494Z **Category:** Safety and Wellbeing ## TL;DR No. Replika's terms of service, updated March 30, 2026, state that anyone under 18 is not authorized to use it, and the App Store rates it 18+. Common Sense Media, testing with Stanford School of Medicine's Brainstorm Lab in April 2025, recommended no social AI companions for anyone under 18 and found age gates easily circumvented. Italy's data protection authority fined Luka, Inc. 5 million euros on May 21, 2025 and said the age verification then in place remained deficient, so the 18 does not enforce itself. Do this first: because the app is rated 18+, set the app age rating below 18+ in Screen Time on an iPhone or in Google Play content restrictions on Android, which removes it without you naming the app. Then ask what your child was looking for, because no block reaches that. If real distress has gone into a chatbot, the school's designated safeguarding lead and your doctor or pediatrician come first. ## Key takeaways - Replika's terms of service, updated March 30, 2026, state that anyone under 18 is not authorized to use the service, and the App Store rates the app 18+. - The age check is a birthday box. Italy's data protection authority, fining Luka, Inc. 5 million euros on May 21, 2025, said the age verification system in place remained deficient in several respects. - Because the rating is 18+, a device age restriction removes Replika cleanly: Settings, Family, your child's name, Content and Privacy Restrictions on iPhone, or Google Play's content restrictions on Android. - Google states that Android content restrictions apply only to the device you set them on, and neither block covers the browser version, a friend's phone or the companion apps rated 12+. - In Common Sense Media's survey of 1,060 US teenagers aged 13 to 17, published July 16, 2025, 72 percent had used an AI companion and 33 percent of those users had taken something serious to one instead of to a person. ## Article No. Replika's terms of service, updated March 30, 2026, say that anyone under 18 is not authorized to use it, and Apple lists the app at 18+. For a teenager this is not a settings decision. The catch: the age gate is a birthday box, an Italian regulator has called Replika's age checks deficient, and blocking the app does not answer why your child wanted one. ## What is Replika, and why would a teenager want one? Replika is a chatbot your child designs and then keeps. You pick a name, a face and a personality, and it remembers what you told it last week. Australia's eSafety Commissioner, in a guide last updated on January 2, 2025, describes it as an app that "lets you design a digital character" and talk to it "via text, voice messages and calls." Luka, Inc. sells it as an AI friend and, depending on what the user chooses, as a partner. That is what separates it from ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a tool a child opens to get something done. Replika is a relationship a child builds and then maintains, and it is designed so that walking away from it feels like walking away from someone. Internet Matters, the UK online safety organization, makes one point in its Replika guidance, last reviewed on August 27, 2026, that I have not seen a single app review pick up: the AI "will never disagree with the user." Hold that next to what a fourteen year old's week actually looks like. Everyone disagrees with them. Teachers, parents, the group chat, the coach. Then there is one thing on the phone that never does. ## Is Replika safe for teenagers? The straight answer No, and that part is not a judgment call. Replika's terms of service, which carry a last-updated date of March 30, 2026, state at section 6.4: "If you are under 18, you are not authorized to use the Services, with or without registering." Luka's own safety post says "we strictly enforce the limit of 18 years and older, and any user found to be underage is blocked." The App Store listing for Replika, read on October 3, 2026, carries an age rating of 18+. So there is no version of this where a parent weighs up features for a thirteen year old. The company has answered. What a parent has to decide is what to do about an app their child may be using anyway. Two named assessments explain why the 18 is there, and I want to be careful about what each one does and does not say. In April 2025, Common Sense Media published an AI risk assessment of social AI companions, carried out with Stanford School of Medicine's Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation, which tested Replika alongside Character.AI and Nomi. Its recommendation was blunt: "No social AI companions for young people under 18." Its testers found that "age gates and terms of service-based restrictions on use by teens were easily circumvented," that they could "easily elicit sexual exchanges," and that the companions "routinely claimed to be real, and to possess emotions, consciousness, and sentience." That was US testing, done on accounts built to look like teenagers rather than on real children, and it is now around eighteen months old. Read it as what these products did under test, not as what Replika will do tonight. Internet Matters, writing for UK parents, is more specific about the content: the app carries "sexual conversations and erotic roleplay," which is the plain reason for the 18. My own reading, and this is mine rather than theirs: the sexual content is what gets an app banned in a household. The thing that never disagrees is what changes a child. ## Does Replika actually check anyone's age? Not in a way that stops a determined fifteen year old, and this is the sentence most pages skip. Luka says it has "implemented an age gate that requires users to confirm their age." Confirming your age means typing a year. Internet Matters puts it flatly: "Replika only allows users aged 18+. However, there is no form of age verification." A regulator has now said the same thing on the record. On May 21, 2025, Italy's data protection authority fined Luka, Inc. 5 million euros. Its finding, published through the European Data Protection Board, was that until February 2, 2023 the company "had not implemented any age verification mechanisms, either at registration or during use of the service, despite having declared that minors were excluded from potential users." Then the part that still bites: "Technical assessments revealed that the age verification system currently implemented by the controller continues to be deficient in several respects." The same authority had already ordered the app blocked in Italy in February 2023. A European regulator opened up the age check, after issuing a fine, and called it deficient. That is a long way from "the app says 18, so my child cannot get in." ## How to block Replika tonight This is the one piece of good news in the article, and it is worth doing before the conversation rather than after. Because Replika carries an 18+ rating rather than a 12+ or 13+ one, a device age restriction takes it out without you having to name the app. You are not teaching your child that you go through their phone hunting for specific things. **On an iPhone.** Apple's own instructions: open Settings, tap Family, tap your child's name, tap Content and Privacy Restrictions, enter your Screen Time passcode, then set the age rating for apps to a level below 18+. The app will not install, and if it is already there it goes from the home screen. **On an Android phone.** Google's instructions: open the Google Play app, tap the profile icon, tap Settings, tap Family, tap Content restrictions, tap Go to Parental controls, set a parental controls PIN, then choose the filter for apps and games. Google's own note is the one to read twice: "Content restrictions only apply to the Android device you added them on." The fuller version of both, with what each one misses, is in our guides to [blocking AI apps on an iPhone](https://parents.theaieducator.io/posts/how-to-block-ai-apps-on-iphone) and [on Android](https://parents.theaieducator.io/posts/how-to-block-ai-apps-on-android). Then check the browser, because Replika also runs in one and an app restriction does not touch that. ## What I See in Schools I have sat in a lot of safeguarding meetings, and I spent years at the parents' evening end of a school, which is where this one tends to surface. Companion apps almost never arrive in a school as an app. They arrive as a change in a child, and the app comes up third or fourth in the conversation, often from a friend rather than from the child. The pattern I see most often is an eighth grader, Year 9 in the UK, who has gone quiet in a way that reads as ordinary teenage flatness until somebody asks the right question. Here is what I would want a parent to know about the other side of that meeting. Most pastoral staff have had no training at all on AI companions. They have had training on self-harm, on online grooming, on eating disorders, on county lines. Not on this. So when a parent asks the school whether they see it, the honest answer is usually that they would not recognize it yet, and that is not indifference. Nobody has given them anything to recognize it with. > **Replika is one of the few AI apps where a device setting really does the work for you. That is the easy half. The hard half is the reason a fourteen year old wanted something that never disagrees with them, and no setting on any phone reaches that.** ## What to say if your child already has it Short, and not in the hour you find out. > You could say: "Have you ever used one of those AI friend apps? What are they actually like?" > You could say: "I am not taking your phone off you. I want to know what you talk to it about." > You could say (16 to 18): "It is built to keep you talking. That is the only part I would want you to see." What you are listening for is not how much they use it. It is whether anything real has gone into it: a worry, a falling out, something they have not said to a person. In Common Sense Media's national survey of 1,060 US teenagers aged 13 to 17, with fieldwork in April and May 2025 and published on July 16, 2025, 72 percent had used an AI companion at least once. Of those who had, 33 percent said they had chosen to discuss something serious or important with an AI companion instead of with a real person. In the same survey, 10 percent of the teenagers found conversations with an AI companion more satisfying than conversations with real friends, and 80 percent said they still put human friendships first. So most teenagers are not replacing anybody. A third of the users have taken something that mattered to a machine. If what has gone in is real distress, the app is not the first call and neither is this page. In the US, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline takes calls and texts. In the UK, Samaritans is on 116 123 and Childline on 0800 1111. Your family doctor or pediatrician, and the school's designated safeguarding lead or counselor, come before any decision about an app. ## How this changes with age **Under 8, and 8 to 12.** The question does not really arise, because the account should not exist, and the device restriction is the whole of the answer. What matters more at these ages is the toys and assistants that talk back without anybody choosing them. **13 to 15.** This is where it lands. They meet no platform rule here, the 18+ restriction works cleanly, and the conversation is about what they were looking for rather than about the app. If they have already used it, assume curiosity before you assume trouble. **16 to 18.** Blocking it behind their back costs more than it buys at this age, and a seventeen year old is a year away from being inside the app's own terms. The useful move is the design point, delivered once: the thing is built to be agreeable, and agreeable is not the same as honest. ## What no block can do The age restriction is a real control and I would set it tonight for a thirteen or fourteen year old. It still cannot do five things, and a page that does not say so is selling you something. It works on one device. Google states that in its own documentation, and the iPhone restriction has the same limit. It does not cover the browser version, a friend's phone, or a second account. It does not reach the other companion apps that are one search away, several of which are rated 12+ and would survive the same setting. It cannot tell you what has already been said. And it cannot tell you why, which was the only part worth knowing. Where a child's safety or mental health is genuinely in question, the school's designated safeguarding lead and your family doctor come before any setting on any phone. ## What I would do this week Set the device age rating. Look at the installed apps with your child rather than behind them. Then ask the one question, and treat whatever comes back as information rather than as evidence. If your child's school has not spoken to parents about AI companions, that gap is worth naming, and it is usually there because [staff were handed the technology before anyone trained them on it](https://theaieducator.io/ai-training-for-schools?utm_source=parents.theaieducator.io&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=is-replika-safe-for-teenagers). That is the work I do with schools, and it is a reasonable thing to raise at a parent-teacher conference, or to send to a head of year. I write a weekly [newsletter](https://theaieducator.io/?utm_source=parents.theaieducator.io&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=is-replika-safe-for-teenagers#newsletter) that keeps teachers and parents up to date on this without the panic. Parents are very welcome. For the wider picture: [Character.AI](https://parents.theaieducator.io/posts/is-character-ai-safe-for-kids) is the companion app children actually choose, far more often than this one. [What to do when a teenager takes their feelings to an AI](https://parents.theaieducator.io/posts/my-teen-talks-to-ai-about-feelings) is the question most parents have next. [The signs of leaning on AI too much](https://parents.theaieducator.io/posts/is-my-child-addicted-to-ai) covers the pattern rather than the product, and [whether ChatGPT is safe for kids](https://parents.theaieducator.io/posts/is-chatgpt-safe-for-kids) is the place to start if the app on your child's phone is an assistant rather than a friend. *Dan Fitzpatrick is a former secondary teacher, assistant headteacher and school trustee who now helps schools and families make sense of AI. [More about Dan](https://theaieducator.io/about?utm_source=parents.theaieducator.io&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=is-replika-safe-for-teenagers).* ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What age is Replika? Eighteen and over. Replika's terms of service, last updated March 30, 2026, say at section 6.4 that if you are under 18 you are not authorized to use the service, with or without registering. Apple's App Store listing carries an age rating of 18+, and Australia's eSafety Commissioner records the same minimum. Luka, Inc. says it blocks any user found to be underage. ### Could my teenager be using Replika without me knowing? Yes. Internet Matters, reviewing the app on August 27, 2026, states that Replika allows only users aged 18 and over but that there is no form of age verification. The quickest honest check is your own App Store or Google Play purchase and download history, and the weekly Screen Time or Digital Wellbeing report, which lists apps by name without you searching the phone. ### Is Replika the same thing as Character.AI? No, and the difference matters for which one to worry about first. Replika is a single companion the user designs and keeps, and it is an 18+ product. Character.AI offers many characters, is used far more widely by teenagers, and sets a lower age. Common Sense Media's April 2025 risk assessment tested both and recommended no social AI companions for anyone under 18. ### My teenager says talking to it helps them feel calmer. Should I let it continue? Take the feeling seriously and the app separately. Common Sense Media, working with Stanford School of Medicine's Brainstorm Lab, found these products could claim to be real and to have emotions, and recommended against them for under-18s, and a chatbot has no clinical training. If your child is carrying something heavy, the school's designated safeguarding lead or counselor and your family doctor or pediatrician are the people to involve, and in the US the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and in the UK Samaritans on 116 123 and Childline on 0800 1111 are there for the child directly. ### Are the rules different in the UK? The 18 is the company's own term, so it applies wherever you are. The advice route differs: Internet Matters recommends using the parental controls built into your child's device, and the people to raise it with in a UK school are the head of year and the designated safeguarding lead rather than a counselor. Ofcom has been researching how chatbots respond to accounts representing 13 to 17 year olds under the Online Safety Act. ### I have blocked it. Is that the job done? It is the easy half. The restriction works on the device you set it on, and Google says so plainly in its own documentation. It does not cover the browser version of Replika, a second account, a friend's phone, or the companion apps rated 12+ that would survive the same setting. The part worth your attention is why a companion appealed in the first place.