Is AI safe for children? Inside KORA's benchmark

Is AI safe for children? Inside KORA's benchmark

From Education Futures by Svenia Busson & Laurent Jolie

April 16, 2026 · 45 min · Season 1 · Episode 36

About this episode

The episode discusses the safety of LLMs for children and the work of KORA in measuring this safety.

What happens when millions of children start talking to LLMs every day and no one knows whether it's safe? In this episode, Laurent Jolie sits down with Stéphie Herlin, co-founder and Research & Product Lead at KORA, the first independent, non-profit, open-source benchmark measuring how safe LLMs are for children. Before KORA, Stéphie spent 8+ years as a government economist, then moved into education as a policy analyst and teacher — spending nearly five years in a French public classroom with 6- to 10-year-olds while retraining in neuroscience, developmental science and pedagogy. We talk about why education hasn't had its scientific revolution yet and what precision education could look like; Stéphie's earlier ed-tech project Brio and the tension between engagement-first investors and outcomes-first science; how KORA works (generating conversations between synthetic child profiles and real LLMs, judged against a taxonomy of 25 risks / 8 categories co-built with ~30 experts); the first results (average safety ~44%, ranging 13–78%, with some models regressing over time); why educational integrity is the industry's biggest blind spot (about a third of US kids use LLMs every…

People in this episode

Host: Laurent Jolie

Guest: Stéphie Herlin

Topics covered

  • AI safety
  • children
  • education
  • LLMs
  • KORA
  • ed-tech

Keywords

  • AI
  • children
  • safety
  • KORA
  • LLMs
  • education
  • ed-tech

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: KORA, Brio

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