Over the past year and a half, OpenAI has steadily gained legitimacy among legacy media companies, signing content deals with publishers to feed material to ChatGPT and its other generative artificial intelligence products. Last week, Disney agreed to allow 200 of its prized film and television characters to appear in AI-generated videos on OpenAI’s Sora app. Disney also invested $1 billion in OpenAI.

But OpenAI’s next growth opportunity could rely on a more explicit form of content: AI pornography.

On Thursday, the same day that Disney and OpenAI announced their content partnership, Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s chief executive of applications, said that ChatGPT’s “adult mode” would launch in the first quarter of 2026. Simo added that OpenAI is already testing the mode in several unnamed countries, with the goal of better differentiating between its adult and underage users before debuting in the US.

A survey of 3,000 adults from the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies released in February found that 16 percent maintain weekly sexual conversations with chatbots. That number would likely grow significantly if ChatGPT — which has 800 million weekly users, making it the largest chatbot platform in the world — allowed for erotic conversations.

Why OpenAI would turn to AI pornography may have something to do with its precarious financial standing.

Despite the widespread adoption of ChatGPT, OpenAI is hemorrhaging billions of dollars and has a difficult path to profitability. Its growth strategy involves an unprecedented commitment of well over $1 trillion over the next few years on graphics processing units, data center facilities, and other infrastructure.

Jim Reid, a Deutsche Bank analyst, estimated in a note this month that OpenAI’s losses between 2024 and 2029 would amount to $140 billion. OpenAI’s own estimates put the company’s losses at $74 billion in 2028 alone, according to the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI does not expect to become profitable until 2030, with that expectation being based on a long-shot revenue projection of nearly $200 billion.

AI pornography, meanwhile, is a relatively small but growing business. The research group Global Commerce Media estimated the industry is worth $2.5 billion this year. But there is plenty of time for companies like OpenAI to capitalize, as Global Commerce Media also estimated that AI pornography will grow at a steady rate of 27 percent annually until 2028.

A recent estimate from Oxford University researcher Zilan Qian suggests that tens of millions of people currently engage in regular sexual or romantic conversations with chatbots. The real number could be much higher. Qian’s estimate was focused on boutique friendship and relationship-focused chatbots and did not include sexual or romantic interactions with mainstream platforms like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok. In remarks to the AP, Qian said OpenAI is not “really earning much through subscriptions so having erotic content will bring them quick money.”

For now, at least, OpenAI’s foray into pornography will not include photo or video-generated content and will instead focus on text-based “erotica.” But those more visual offerings have proven productive for one of OpenAI’s rivals.

xAI, the artificial intelligence firm founded by Elon Musk, has focused heavily on providing users of its Grok chatbot with the tools and latitude to create extremely graphic pornography. xAI offers a “spicy mode” that Grok users have relied on to produce an endless stream of AI pornography. Two communities on Reddit, the r/grok and r/Grok_Porn subreddits, have a combined 132,000 members who frequently exchange thousands of pornographic images and videos created using Grok. Some Grok users have even created pornographic images using copyrighted material, including Disney princesses.

‘Erotica for verified adults’

In October, when OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman announced that ChatGPT would be allowing “erotica,” he framed the decision as an appeal to personal liberties. “Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases,” Altman wrote in a post on X. “As part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”

It’s still not clear how OpenAI will prevent children from using ChatGPT for sexual conversations, although the company released parental controls in September and has said it is developing an age-verification system. Age verification appears to be an increasingly pressing issue as more minors turn to chatbots for highly personal conversations. In July, a study from Common Sense Media found that more than 70 percent of adolescents have turned to AI companions, with half using them repeatedly.

Last year, OpenAI’s Joanne Jang promised the company would never allow deepfakes, a term referring to a video or image that has been digitally altered — usually maliciously — to appear like a real person.

Jang was less conclusive when it came to other forms of pornography, saying OpenAI wasn’t “trying now to create AI porn” but added that it would depend “on your definition of porn.”