Snapchat brings My AI to everyone

Snap just unlocked its My AI chatbot for all Snapchat users worldwide, moving the OpenAI-powered feature out from behind the Snapchat+ paywall.

During its initial test with paying subscribers, My AI saw massive engagement, logging nearly 2 million chat messages every day about movies, pets, sports, and daily trivia. Now, Snap is rolling it out globally with several new social tricks up its sleeve.

Bringing AI straight into group chats

Users can now customize their My AI with thousands of unique Bitmoji variations, give it a custom name, and start conversing one-on-one.

More interestingly, you can now drag My AI directly into group conversations with your actual friends. By typing @My AI, the bot enters the chat to answer questions on behalf of the group, marked clearly by a sparkle icon next to its name.

It is also hooked directly into Snapchat's platform features. My AI can surface location recommendations from the Snap Map or recommend specific AR Lenses for birthdays and events.

Snapchatters can now send regular photo Snaps to My AI and receive text replies. Snap noted that over 55,000 Snaps are created every second on the app. To capitalize on that visual habit, Snap plans to let Snapchat+ subscribers send a Snap to My AI and get an entirely AI-generated Snap back.

Guardrails for a younger crowd

Deploying an LLM to hundreds of millions of young users is a safety minefield, and Snap knows it. The company claims 99.5% of My AI responses currently comply with community guidelines, but they are adding extra layers of protection.

Snap implemented a new age signal based on the user's birthday, forcing the chatbot to keep conversations age-appropriate.

There is also new moderation tech that assesses the severity of harmful inputs and temporarily revokes access for users who repeatedly misuse it.

Finally, Snap is integrating My AI into its Family Center parental controls, allowing parents to monitor whether and how often their teens are chatting with the bot.

Why it matters

While Microsoft and Google have treated LLMs primarily as workplace co-pilots and enhanced search engines, Snap is proving that AI can simply be another friend in your contact list. Embedding the bot into group chats and tying it to visual Lenses and Snap Map makes the technology feel like a native social feature rather than a clinical productivity tool.

We think this is a clever distribution move that lowers the friction of using AI to virtually zero for millions of everyday users. However, rolling out a conversational bot to a demographic heavy on teenagers carries real baggage. Snap's age-gating and parental oversight tools will be tested hard, but if they pull this off safely, they will set the blueprint for how consumer social apps integrate generative AI going forward.