10% of Brazil's Connected Kids Already Confide in an AI

Bill Gates paints a scene for anyone with a kid at home. A child with four or five friends, all of them artificial intelligence. She will never find out that a friend woke up in a bad mood, that a friend misread what she said, that a friend needs help today. The machine is too accommodating for that. “The normal adjustment we go through of developing socially,” he says, “that will be completely ignored.”

He talks like a man pointing at the horizon. But Cetic.br, the research arm of Brazil’s internet governance body, went into the field between March and September 2025 and asked 2,370 children and teenagers what they actually do with generative AI.

TIC Kids Online Brasil 2025, the country’s long-running survey of how minors use the internet, found that 65% of connected 9-to-17-year-olds use it. Within that group, 10% already use the tool to talk about personal problems and emotions. Among 15-to-17-year-olds, 12%.

That isn’t a projection. It’s measured: of the 24.5 million connected Brazilian children and teenagers, the 65% who use generative AI add up to roughly 15.9 million, and it’s within that group that 1 in 10 shows up.

Gates’s interview with Van Jones, published on the host’s channel, runs 31 minutes and is the best public summary of the essay he released on Gates Notes on August 26. It’s worth watching. It also carries three claims that don’t survive fact-checking, and the most wrong of them hides the single most useful piece of information in the whole conversation for a Brazilian parent. That’s what I want to take apart: what the warning gets right, what it gets wrong, and what is already happening here while the argument happens there.

The greenhouse arrived before the warning

The metaphor is good, and it’s his. In the essay, going by the indexed excerpts in circulation, Gates writes that a companion designed never to upset you is “a big, protected greenhouse,” something that never pushes anyone out of their comfort zone. In the interview, Van Jones turns that into a “greenhouse bubble.” The image is the same either way: glass, controlled temperature, a seedling that grows beautifully and dies in the first real wind.

What changes is the tense. Gates speaks in the future, with the caution of someone proposing an international agenda. The Brazilian numbers are in the present.

The full distribution dismantles the panic and sustains the concern at the same time. Among connected 9-to-17-year-olds who use generative AI: 59% for schoolwork, 42% to look up information, 21% to create text and images, 10% to talk about personal problems. Most of the use is utilitarian and boring, like almost every new technology once it stops being news.

But age organizes everything. Schoolwork goes from 37% among 9-and-10-year-olds to 68% among 15-to-17-year-olds. Emotional conversation follows the same gradient: 4% in childhood, 12% in adolescence. The older the user, the further inside the machine gets.

This was the survey’s first edition to ask about generative AI, and there is no time series. Nobody can honestly say this “grew.” You can only say it’s already there.

On the suffering side, Brazil has a number too. In PeNSE 2024, the national school health survey run by IBGE, the federal statistics bureau, 18.5% of students aged 13 to 17 said they felt, most of the time or always, that life is not worth living.

We have the usage data and the pain data. What does not exist, here or anywhere, is the study that connects the two. Hold on to that gap. It comes back later, on the side of the people sounding the alarm.

First, the part of the interview where Gates praises a decision that isn’t the one he thinks it is.

What China banned, and it isn’t what Gates said

Asked about limits for children, Gates answers that “China’s actually been the strongest at saying, hey, we’re just not going to have kids have access to this.” The sentence is wrong, and the error is interesting: the real rule is more surgical than a ban, and far easier to transplant here.

On April 10, 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China and four other agencies published the Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services, in force since July 15. What they forbid for minors is one specific category: virtual relative, virtual partner and other simulated intimate relationships.

Everything else stays allowed, with guardian consent for children under 14, a mandatory “minor mode,” time-of-use limits, periodic reminders that the thing is a machine, and an alert every two continuous hours.

In other words: China did not shut the door. It banned the product “virtual girlfriend for teenagers” and regulated the rest by the clock.

The distinction matters because it is exactly what Brazil lacks. We legislated on digital childhood before AI entered the conversation, and we legislated well. Law 15,100/2025 took phones out of the classroom. Law 15,211/2025, the “Digital ECA,” an update to the Statute of the Child and Adolescent that anchors children’s rights in Brazil, required platforms to verify age, offer family supervision and follow data rules, with fines of up to 50 million reais (roughly US$ 9 million at 2026 rates) per violation, enforced since March 2026 by ANPD, the national data protection authority.

The paradox stands on its own. The country the American conversation treats as the authoritarian villain of AI is the only one that has written a rule aimed precisely at what 12% of Brazilian teenagers already do. Gates praised China for the wrong reason.

If the Chinese rule is finer than he imagines, the evidence behind his warning is thinner than it sounds.

The two authorities Gates cites, and how much weight they hold

To justify the concern, Gates invokes two names: Jonathan Haidt and Scott Galloway. It’s the natural move of someone trying to get out of mere opinion. But both come with caveats the interview never mentions.

Haidt wrote The Anxious Generation, published in 2024, which attributes the collapse in adolescent mental health in the early 2010s to the replacement of a play-based childhood with a phone-based one. The book sold enormously and shifted the public debate in several countries.

In Nature, the psychologist Candice Odgers reviewed it to say that the central thesis, that digital technologies are rewiring children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness, “is not supported by science.” Most of the available data, she points out, is correlational.

Galloway popularizes the male loneliness numbers. They are real, and they come from the Survey Center on American Life: the share of men with no close friends went from 3% to 15% between 1990 and 2021, and the share with six or more close friends fell from 55% to 27%. That is American data from 2021, older than companion chatbots. It describes the ground the AI is landing on. It cannot measure what the AI does.

And the study the coverage links to Gates’s essay? A Stanford and Carnegie Mellon survey of 1,131 Character.AI users, 244 of whom donated their chat histories: more than 413,000 messages. Using the product for companionship is associated with lower well-being, and the association worsens with heavier use. The authors themselves write, in plain words, that the cross-sectional design of the data does not allow them to establish causality. People who feel worse may be seeking out the chatbot. The chatbot may be making the seekers worse. The data cannot tell the two apart.

None of this makes Gates wrong. It makes the situation more uncomfortable than if he were: the concern is reasonable, the evidence is thin, and the decision about millions of childhoods will be made inside that gap. It’s the same gap Estonia decided to bet on, and I told that story in detail in the post about the Estonian program. The dilemma is identical: act without proof, or wait for proof that arrives after the generation does.

Which brings us to the most original idea in the interview, and the arithmetic it never closes.

“Human reserved” work and the question of who pays

Gates proposes a new category: occupations society would protect from AI replacement even after machines become capable of doing them. He compares it to nature reserves. Areas fenced off not because the technology falls short, but because of a decision about what kind of life we want.

In the interview he ventures a size: “what part of the job market is that, if you could get it up to 40 or 50%.” Notice the construction. It’s a hypothesis said out loud, not an estimate. There is no methodology behind that number, and it should not circulate as if there were.

The arithmetic nobody does is a different one. If protected work costs more than the robot, where does the difference come from? Taxes, prices, or wages? Gates gets close when he observes that today “we tax labor and treat capital well,” and that this will have to be revisited. But he stops at the diagnosis.

There is also an inversion in the conversation that should frighten people more than it does. Van Jones is the one who formulates it: today, having a robot do everything for you is a rich person’s privilege; tomorrow it could flip, with everyone in a classroom full of machines and “only rich kids getting to play with human teachers.” Gates takes the image on board.

In a country where the human teacher is already the only resource available, and already badly paid, that inversion isn’t science fiction. It’s a municipal budget line.

The coordination he’s asking for is the one falling apart

Here is the part that complicates this post’s own thesis, and it belongs here.

The remedy Gates proposes is international coordination: the United States and China agreeing to monitor models capable of designing molecules, and then everyone else signing on. He says he is “90% sure” China would accept, a subjective probability about an event that never happened and that nobody can check.

His track record with this kind of arrangement is the best argument in its favor. Deaths of children under five worldwide have fallen by more than half since 2000, and the Gates Foundation was one of the central funders of that period.

That was exactly the closing note of the interview. Van Jones thanks Gates for having “cut the death rate of black babies in Africa in half.” The line is Jones’s, not Gates’s, and it gets nearly every part wrong.

The halving is global, not African. The bracket is children under five, not babies. International statistics do not use the category “black babies.” And the result came out of a collective effort by the WHO, UNICEF, Gavi, the Global Fund and national governments that no primary source attributes to a single organization.

The real number is harder and more interesting. In 2024, 4.9 million children died before their fifth birthday, 2.3 million of them newborns. Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 58% of those deaths, at a rate almost fourteen times that of Europe and North America. And since 2015, the pace of decline has slowed by more than 60%.

In December 2025, the Gates Foundation itself projected a rise in child deaths for the first time this century.

Read those two things together. The man asking humanity for an unprecedented global agreement on artificial intelligence is watching, in the field he knows best, the global agreement that worked lose steam and start moving backwards. Not because the science failed. Because the money and the political attention left.

That doesn’t invalidate the proposal. It makes it more urgent and less likely at once, which is the worst possible combination.

Glass protects no one on the inside

The greenhouse is a good metaphor because it contains its own limit. It exists for a seedling that can’t yet take the weather outside, and it works only until the day the seedling has to.

While the world argues over who will build the glass (Washington, Beijing, a summit nobody has called), 12% of connected Brazilian teenagers have already settled the matter on their own, with the phone that was in their hand. Their greenhouse has no door. It has a chat history.

Líder da última revolução tecnológica está dando o alerta sobre ESTA aqui — Van Jones

Sources

• Cetic.br — TIC Kids Online Brasil 2025 (press release, in Portuguese)
• IBGE Educa — PeNSE 2024, adolescent mental health (in Portuguese)
• Cyberspace Administration of China — Interim Measures for Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services (in Chinese)
• Chamber of Deputies — Law 15,211/2025, the “Digital ECA” (in Portuguese)
• Law 15,100/2025 — phones in schools (in Portuguese)
• Jonathan Haidt — The Anxious Generation (official book site)
• Candice Odgers — review of The Anxious Generation, Nature (2024)
• Survey Center on American Life — The State of American Friendship (2021)
• Zhang et al. — The Rise of AI Companions, arXiv preprint (2025)
• Bill Gates — essay on Gates Notes (Aug 26, 2026)
• WHO — child mortality (under 5 years) fact sheet
• WHO — progress in reducing child deaths slows, 4.9 million deaths in 2024
• Gates Foundation — Goalkeepers, projected rise in child deaths (Dec 2025)