Roblox has implemented an AI verification for the ages of all players to prevent younger players from talking to older players, addressing the game’s issue with young kids being at risk of talking to adults.
In August 2025, a content creator named Schlep, who was infamous for catching and arresting some pedophiles, was banned from Roblox. This caused an uproar in the Roblox community because Roblox had not done anything to handle the issue yet.
In January 2026, Roblox introduced AI verification into the platform that assesses photos of people and assigns them to an age range. The other option is to use a valid ID to be assigned an age.
This new update has led players to be dissatisfied with Roblox’s solution. Some players understood Roblox’s intentions, but overall, they disliked the execution.
“I think that it could have been implemented a lot better,” said Grace Garcia, a junior at Logan, “And I think that they had good intentions, but the way they did it completely falled flat, and honestly, it just kind of made the situation worse.”
While there is nothing wrong with the company attempting to protect children from harm, players believe that the new AI verification and age ranges will do more harm than good.
For example, players can easily bypass the AI and be classified into a different age range. People can use makeup or photos of others online to trick the AI into thinking they are a different age.
“Literally, it was beforehand, just faking the year you were born,” said Allison Dizon, a junior. “And now you can just grab your parents’ ID, or you could take some person’s face off the internet if you’re going the selfie route.”
This flaw allows children to be placed in the 21+ age range and allows them to talk to adults, which goes against the purpose of verifying players’ ages.
However, not all players are misplaced due to faking their age. As AI is still in development, errors and mistakes still occur when analyzing photos.
“Like for me, they think I’m 20 years old, they identified me as 20 plus,” said William Ly, a junior at Logan. “And I know my friend was identified as 40-plus.”
This is not the only oversight with the new update. Bypassing the AI works the other way, too, and makes it easier for predators to prey on children.
“It’s just as easy to create an account in the age range you want,“ said Garcia. “Now it’s like you could pick what ages you want to talk to, which is really weird and is really gross.“
Now, child predators can communicate with kids exclusively by choosing the age they want to be. This is problematic because adults can not see what the predator is saying to the child, and therefore can’t report the behavior.
However, players are not the only people affected by the new update. Developers and moderators of the games are also impacted.
“But there’s also the issue of like moderation teams and games,” said Dizon. “They can’t do their job properly if they can’t even see what players are saying.”
Players can report inappropriate behavior of others, and moderators can suspend or ban the player violating Roblox’s policies and terms. Since many players can’t see others’ chat, they can’t report the user to moderators, and more inappropriate behavior will fly under the radar.
Besides the update impacting the players and developers of the game, it has also affected the game itself; players have reported a change within games on Roblox.
“A lot of chat-dependent games have died,” said Ly. “For example, my sister, she likes role-playing a lot on Roblox games, and she has, like, a community that she role-plays with, but because of the chat ban, she hasn’t been able to do anything. And she’s like, the chat has been really dead, and voice chat isn’t any better either.”
Games that rely on chatting (like roleplay games) or voice chat (like karaoke) are heavily affected by the update. Without access to free chatting, players are deterred from playing those games, causing player activity to decrease.
“Games I used to frequent, so, yeah, role-playing games. And after the update, I revisited them, and it is really bad, like one game that would average 1000 players, and that game now averages, like, I don’t know, maybe 300-200,” said Dizon. “Yeah. So I don’t really see a bright future for those kinds of games if this update stays.”
These games are experiencing a decline in player activity, and their futures are unpredictable. The future of Roblox is unpredictable, too.
“I think that if they see how much it’s affecting players and how much of a downfall it’s kind of going down, that they’ll start to listen to players,” said Garcia. “I really hope, because things like this have happened where they’ve made changes, and then they got a lot of backlash, and people were definitely criticizing the game, and they kind of changed and removed and removed the features, but they’re kind of notorious for not really listening to their fan base.”
While some believe that change is possible with the community coming together to protest the update, it’s unknown whether Roblox will take another step to address the issue or if they will come up with another faulty solution.
Overall, many players of the game are unsatisfied with the Roblox chat verification update. Players are struggling to socialize, moderators can not listen to player input fully, and the games on Roblox aren’t doing as well. Whether Roblox will adapt the update to player input or sweep the issue under the rug is uncertain, but voicing concern as a player is one step closer to fixing the issues.
