New Delhi, July 1 -- Hundreds of contractors working on a Meta project allegedly posed as teenagers online to test how competing artificial intelligence chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, eating disorders, drugs and other sensitive topics, according to an investigation by WIRED.

The report, based on internal documents reviewed by the publication and interviews with five people familiar with the project, said the initiative was managed by Meta contractor Covalen and remained active as recently as April 21.

Known internally as "Cannes," the project reportedly targeted OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Character.AI. According to WIRED, workers were instructed to create dummy accounts posing as users under the age of ...