Cybersecurity & Tech

Scaling Laws: Child Safety AI Policy at Scale with Vaishnavi J and Dave Willner

Kevin Frazier, Dave Willner, Vaishnavi J.
Tuesday, September 29, 2026, 10:01 AM

Dave Willner, co-founder of Zentropi, and Vaishnavi J., founder and principal of Vys, join Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior fellow at the Abundance Institute, to examine how AI is affecting younger users and why existing child-safety responses often default to age gates, parental consent, and outright bans.

The conversation then turns to their open-source teen self-harm and suicidal ideation policies, which use age-banded rules and a four-zone framework: remove, suppress with a warning, suppress from recommendations, and allow. Dave and Vaishnavi explain how the policies were developed using more than 1,200 hand-labeled examples, how Zentropi’s CoPE classifier translates written policy into enforcement, and how platforms should evaluate false positives, false negatives, over-refusal, under-refusal, human review, and appeals.

Dave's Tech Policy Press piece.
More on their classifer and research.



Kevin Frazier is a senior editor at Lawfare and the Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law.
Dave Willner is the co-founder of Zentropi. He is the former Head of Trust and Safety at OpenAI, the company that produces ChatGPT.
Vaishnavi J. is the founder and principal of Vys.
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