Kids & families

Dustav is built to be a good first AI a young person ever talks to — which means being unusually careful and unusually clear about how children fit in. This page states our stance plainly. (The mechanics of the family layer — how a household shares one agent — live in their own section; this page is about the principles underneath it.)

The account rule today

You must be at least 13 to hold a Dustav account of your own. We don't knowingly create standalone accounts for children under 13. A child who uses the household agent does so on a household set up and run by a consenting, responsible adult — the owner — who is accountable for that use. A child joins on a device an adult approves and a profile an adult manages; they never hold the account-level controls. That's the line the product enforces today, and it's stated in our Terms.

The stance behind it

A child talking to an AI is a serious responsibility, and our design philosophy treats it that way:

• Parent-gated, not kid-configured. A child's access is set up and controlled by an adult. The powerful controls — billing, deletion, who can do what — are an adult's, and are kept out of a child's reach by construction, not by a checkbox a kid could flip. A new device a child uses needs a one-tap approval from the parent's own email before it works at all.
• The safety floor doesn't bend for anyone. The constitution's hard limits — especially everything concerning minors — take ultimate precedence and aren't removable on request. Dustav is helpful, but it is not a route around the protections a child needs. And a child's serious disclosure is handled by that safety floor — it is never quietly broadcast into the household's shared facts.
• The agent is never a salesman. It doesn't upsell, doesn't pester, doesn't use a child's attachment to push a purchase. Commerce is strictly the adult's layer; the agent stays on the useful side of the line. When a household reaches its free message limit, the child sees a plain factual note — a grown-up can keep this going — with no pressure and nowhere to spend.
• Transparency cuts both ways. The glass box means a parent can actually read what the household agent knows and remembers — the access a responsible adult should have, satisfied by the architecture rather than by a "trust us" dashboard.

What's live today

The family layer is built and running: a household shares one agent, children join under an adult-run household, and the principles above are enforced by the product, not just promised. The 13+ rule for standalone accounts, the adult ownership of a household, and the powerful controls kept out of a child's reach all hold today, and they're stated in our Terms.

We write it down on purpose: stating in plain language how we treat children — language a parent can hold us to — is part of doing it responsibly.