AI distances itself from adult content that once drove the tech revolution

Driving the news: OpenAI nixed plans to launch "erotica for verified adults" last week amid concerns from investors and internal teams about safety measures.

• Investors were spooked after xAI's Grok chatbot generated illegal child sexual abuse material when prompted, and even after a safety patch was issued, users could still create non-consensual sexualized images.
• OpenAI was also concerned about minors accessing erotic content, as ChatGPT failed to predict users' ages with an error rate exceeding 10%.

What they're saying: "It's not worth it," Tracey Follows, a futurist who studies the intersection of technology and humans, tells Axios.

• "[OpenAI is] in the agent productivity game and not the entertainment content game. They've had to make a choice … and they don't want the regulatory pressure."

The big picture: The adult entertainment industry has long served as a catalyst for the commercialization of emerging technologies, accelerating their use elsewhere, from home video to streaming platforms.

Case in point: When the first titan of electronic payment processors laid the groundwork for e-commerce sales, adult entertainment companies were early adopters.

• "You can almost say that they invented e-commerce," Frederick Lane, an author who has written a book about pornographic entrepreneurship, tells Axios.

Obscenity laws and restrictions also forced the adult industry to embrace nascent technologies to stay ahead of regulations.

• "If there was a business model out there for separating consumers from their money, they tried it," Lane said.

Zoom in: Before there was Netflix and chill, there was VHS and Betamax, which competed to dominate home video recording.

• VHS ultimately prevailed, in part because Sony's Betamax restricted the recording of adult content.

"Each step of that content ladder requires faster and faster transmission speeds," Lane said, noting that programmers with industry experience became highly sought after once the demand for explicit images and videos grew online, because outside companies valued their website optimization expertise.

• Adult film performers embraced subscription models way before streaming giants like HBO and Paramount caught on.

Between the lines: There's a reason why businesspeople say "sex sells." Even now, the adult entertainment industry drives innovation and clicks.

• The no. 1 porn site in the world had 3.3 billion page views in February 2026, compared to Netflix's 1.2 billion, according to analytics firm Semrush.
• The next most-visited streaming platform, Disney+, had 250 million views.

More and more Americans are leaning into AI romance to help address the nation's loneliness epidemic. About 1 in 5 American adults have chatted with an AI agent to simulate a romantic partnership, per Brigham Young University's Wheatley Institute.

• Some find the chatbots' comforting and agreeable listeners, while others think there's no real substitute for physical touch.

What we're watching: "Most of the big enterprise players, like OpenAI and all of its competitors, won't be able to go down this route," Fellows says.

• "It will open up the market to less corporatized, more entrepreneurial players, and you'll get the equivalent of an OnlyFans but in the AI space," Fellows says, adding that she could see a future where specialized companies build out AI companions' capabilities or create more hyper-realistic sex-tech devices through augmented reality.
• OpenAI did not respond to Axios' request for comment.

Go deeper: What OpenAI's erotica retreat really means