META'S AI WILL NOW GUESS YOUR AGE — AND LOCK TEENS OUT OF ADULT ACCOUNTS WORLDWIDE

Meta said November 9 it is expanding its AI age-estimation technology globally on Instagram: the system finds people it suspects are teens — even if they entered an adult birthday — and places them in Teen Account protections that limit who can contact them, what they see, and their time on the apps. Meta says millions more teens will get the protections.

The expansion builds on Meta's agreement with 52 bipartisan attorneys general; the technology keeps rolling out on Facebook and comes to Threads later this year, and in Australia Meta has begun using Apple's age-range signal. Meta gives no accuracy or error rates for the age estimates, and no country count for the global step.