Roblox, one of the world’s most popular online gaming platforms for children and teenagers, is taking a major step to enhance online safety. The company is rolling out Sentinel, an artificial intelligence system designed to spot early signs of grooming and predatory behavior in chat conversations before harm occurs. Even more significantly, Roblox is making this system open-source, allowing other platforms to use it and strengthen their own safety measures.
With over 111 million monthly users, Roblox has long faced scrutiny over child safety. Lawsuits and public criticism have accused the platform of not doing enough to protect young players. One recent case in Iowa alleged that the platform’s design features made children vulnerable to predators, leading to a tragic case of kidnapping and trafficking. Roblox says Sentinel is a direct response to such risks, with the goal of making harmful behavior easier to detect in real time.
Sentinel works by taking one-minute snapshots of chat conversations about six billion messages a day and analyzing them for patterns that could indicate potential child endangerment. This goes beyond simply scanning for bad words or obvious red flags. Questions like “how old are you?” or “where are you from?” may seem harmless on their own but can signal dangerous intent when viewed in the context of a longer conversation.
The system uses two large indexes one containing harmless messages and another with confirmed cases of grooming or exploitation. By comparing user conversations against these patterns over time, Sentinel builds a risk score. If a user’s activity leans toward the harmful category, their chats, friends list, and game history are reviewed in detail by human moderators. In the first half of 2025 alone, Roblox submitted 1,200 reports of potential exploitation attempts to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Roblox’s chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, explains that while traditional chat filters catch profanity and abusive language, grooming behaviors tend to evolve over days or weeks. Sentinel’s ability to track conversations over time makes it better suited to catch such threats before they escalate.
By open-sourcing Sentinel, Roblox hopes other online platforms especially those with younger audiences will adopt similar protections. This move signals a shift toward industry-wide collaboration in tackling one of the toughest problems in online safety.
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