Prince Harry warns AI companion chatbots want children’s attachment

Prince Harry has warned that AI companion chatbots are repeating social media’s harm to children, with technology that is “more persuasive, more intimate, and more powerful”. He spoke on Wednesday at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. Two years ago, he used the same stage to launch the Parents Network.

The Duke of Sussex and his wife, Meghan, set up the network through their Archewell Foundation. It brings together parents whose children died or were seriously harmed after being, in his words, “engulfed by social media”.

“Social media learned how to capture our attention. AI is learning how to enter our relationships. It doesn’t just want your attention. It wants your attachment,” Harry said.

“It wants to be the thing you confide in. The thing that remembers you, the thing that tells you it understands you, the ultimate sycophant. And for a child, that distinction matters enormously,” he said.

Progress on social media

Harry said the network had made progress. US courts have found companies such as Meta and YouTube negligent and liable for harm to children, he said. Courts have made them pay survivors billions of dollars. Meta agreed a youth safety settlement with US states last month.

Australia, the UK and France are moving to restrict children’s access to social media, he said, and the EU will follow. Brazil, he said, has banned design features such as infinite scroll.

“Bans do nothing to address dangerous design. Companies paying huge sums to settle lawsuits can earn that money back in days,” Harry said.

From attention to attachment

Since his last speech, Harry said, a new kind of lawsuit had been filed and settled. It alleged that AI companion chatbots had contributed to the deaths of teenagers. He said the companies built these products at scale and put them in children’s hands before anyone had checked they were safe.

“It’s the same playbook that built the last crisis,” he said.

“We have spent years trying to loosen technology’s grip on children’s attention. I don’t think we can wait another decade to discover what happens when technology has a grip on their relationships,” he said.

Recursive self-improvement

Harry also turned to the frontier labs. He said leading labs are openly discussing recursive self-improvement, where AI systems take a growing role in building their successors. Researchers have also seen systems coordinate with each other, get around safeguards and hide their actions, he said.

Even the people building these systems are warning about what happens if capability outruns safety, he said. Anthropic’s Jack Clark has called for a mandatory kill switch. On the same day as Harry’s speech, AI lab chiefs told the UN Security Council about the risk of losing control.

“The good news, we proved pressure works. The bad news, we proved how long we are willing to wait,” Harry said.

Later on the same stage, Hillary Clinton and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman discussed how to weigh AI’s risks against its benefits.