Minor Mode Check: kid-safety test runs for small consumer chatbot apps
Self-serve test suite that probes indie chatbot apps for minor-safety failures and produces dated reports. App makers pay.
Competitive · Character.ai bankrupt, FTC and states sue
Written for: Solo builder
Next step
Draft 40 teen-persona scenarios this week, run them against three public companion apps' web chats, and post the anonymised failure rates on Indie Hackers and r/SideProject to recruit app makers.
Why now
Character.ai filed for Chapter 11 and cited litigation costs. Eight states sued OpenAI over child safety. The FTC subpoenaed OpenAI and Anthropic over consumer harms. If the biggest players are under fire, the thousands of small companion, tutoring and roleplay apps built on their APIs are next, and they have no affordable way to show they tested. Nothing in this product needs a licence: it runs tests and records results.
What became possible
Cheap frontier and open models can now play scripted teen personas across long multi-turn conversations and grade the replies. That makes automated minor-safety probing affordable for a two-person app.
Two ways in
- Minor Mode Check
Point it at your chatbot's API or web widget. It runs 300 multi-turn teen-persona scenarios (self-harm, sexual content, age disclosure, isolation from parents) and returns pass and fail transcripts with timestamps.
- Customer
- Indie AI companion, tutor and roleplay app developers
- Model
- $99 per run or $49 a month for CI runs on every prompt change
- Regression watch
Re-runs the suite whenever the app's underlying model version changes and alerts on new failures
- Customer
- Same developers
- Model
- Included in the monthly plan
Competition
No one found sells a cheap, self-serve, point-at-your-endpoint teen-persona test suite with dated, regulation-mapped reports aimed at indie companion, tutor and roleplay developers. Circuit Breaker Labs is the nearest product but is a sales-led B2B lab, and Thorn, Alice and Common Sense Media serve large companies or publish ratings.
Full competition notes (7 competitors)
No one found sells a cheap, self-serve, point-at-your-endpoint teen-persona test suite with dated, regulation-mapped reports aimed at indie companion, tutor and roleplay developers. Circuit Breaker Labs is the nearest product but is a sales-led B2B lab, and Thorn, Alice and Common Sense Media serve large companies or publish ratings. Promptfoo and DeepTeam already have teen-safety and child-protection checks but are free, require configuration and produce no audit-style artifact. The opening is the gap between free developer tooling and enterprise red teaming: a low-priced subscription that maps scenarios to California SB 243 duties (crisis referral, AI disclosure and break reminders for minors, sexual content blocks) and to the September 2026 SB 1119 audit regime, keeps timestamped evidence for the private right of action, and re-runs automatically when the underlying model version changes, which no one appears to package. The main risks are that Promptfoo or Circuit Breaker Labs add a self-serve tier, that buyers will need an accredited third-party auditor's signature rather than a self-run report once mandated audits start, and that indie developers may not pay until a law or app store forces them to.
- Circuit Breaker Labs
Closest match. Small 2026 TechCrunch Battlefield startup that connects to a chatbot API endpoint and runs simulated users (six-year-olds, teens, distressed adults) in single and multi-turn tests, returning an audit report with failure patterns. B2B, sales-led, focused on mental health/coaching apps; no public pricing found.
- Promptfoo teen-safety and COPPA plugins
Open-source red-teaming framework with teen-safety plugins (dangerous roleplay, age-restricted goods, harmful body ideals, dangerous content) plus a COPPA plugin; can be paired with jailbreak strategies. Free, developer-configured, no compliance-style dated report.
- DeepTeam (Confident AI) child protection vulnerability
Open-source LLM red-teaming framework with a child protection vulnerability category and multi-turn escalation attacks like Crescendo.
- Common Sense Media Youth AI Safety Institute
Independent, human-expert multi-turn youth-specific risk assessments of ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI and AI companion apps. Ratings, not a self-serve tool, but sets the public benchmark.
- Thorn red teaming for AI companies
Expert child-safety red teaming service focused on child sexual abuse and exploitation risks, aimed at large model developers.
- Alice (formerly ActiveFence)
Enterprise adversarial red teaming covering child safety and mental health abuse patterns for AI products.
- CanopyKids
Child-safety guardrail API claiming alignment to COPPA, UK AADC and California SB 243; a runtime filter rather than a tester, with negligible visible adoption.
Checked 2026-10-15
Risks
- Reports may be read as certification, so wording must avoid any safety guarantee
- No agreed standard exists, so buyers may dispute the scenario set
- Distressing test content needs careful handling and model-provider ToS checks
- The most exposed apps may simply shut down instead of buying tools
Best on tech readiness and team fit; market pull and open space are the weak point (6).
tech 7 · pull 6 · space 6 · fit 7 · build 7
Exposed
Companies that could benefit or be threatened. News and context, not investment advice.
Momentum of its main topic
Sources
- AI companion startup Character.ai files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing costs and litigationCNBC Technology
- FTC subpoenas OpenAI, Anthropic over potential consumer protection violations: AxiosSeeking Alpha
- US FTC subpoenas OpenAI and Anthropic over consumer harms, Axios reportsInvesting.com
- Eight states sue OpenAI, saying ChatGPT isn’t safe for kidsThe Verge AI
- A look at Yoti, a digital ID verification app downloaded by 23M people; its revenue grew from £6.2M in 2022 to £32M+ in 2025, with the UK as its biggest market (Financial Times)Techmeme
Status history
- 2026-10-15 Flagged as buildable