Check Whether AI Is Safe for a Child

QP-007 — Child First AI Checklist
TWO-MINUTE RESEARCH PAPER · 1.0.0-r1 · 2026-09-25
STATUS: CANDIDATE RESEARCH — HUMAN/INDEPENDENT REVIEW REQUIRED

WHAT IT IS
This is a checklist that helps adults check whether an AI tool protects a child’s safety, privacy, dignity, understanding, and ability to get help from a real person.

PROBLEM
Check whether an AI product or decision is safe and understandable enough for a child, and whether an adult can step in, stop it, or correct it when needed.

WHO IT IS FOR
parents, caregivers, schools, youth programs, product teams, and anyone choosing AI that could affect a child

WHY IT MATTERS
AI-enabled work can fail through weak evidence, stale information, unclear authority, privacy/security gaps, overconfident outputs, or automation that becomes practically irreversible. NIST's AI RMF provides a lifecycle risk-management frame; Q10 applies that direction by requiring explicit scope, evidence, human authority, limitations, review dates, stop conditions, and rollback.

HOW IT WORKS
Name a human owner; define scope; record evidence, unknowns and contradictions; define permissions and prohibited actions; run baseline and adversarial tests; patch and retest; record residual risk; create a dated release receipt; set a review/TTL date.

VALIDATION STATE
Legal, privacy and child-safety review
Generated research does not upgrade that evidence.

RISKS / FAILURE MODES
Scope creep; evidence drift; stale sources; authority escalation; false-clear from passing tests; privacy leakage; insecure dependencies; common-mode failure; reviewer fatigue; inaccessible interfaces; rollback failure; unsupported claims repeated as fact.

HUMAN CONTROL
A named human retains consequential approval, override, stop, release, and rollback authority.

KNOWN LIMITS
No child-facing operation or safety guarantee

REFERENCE BASIS
NIST AI Risk Management Framework 1.0; NIST Generative AI Profile; NIST Privacy Framework; NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0; OWASP Top 10 for LLM and GenAI; UNICEF Guidance on AI and Children v3.

BOUNDARY
Research/education material only. Not legal, medical, financial, engineering, safety-certification, or regulatory advice.