What age can my child use Snapchat's My AI? And what stays saved

With My AI the minimum-age question has a catch, because the assistant is neither subscribed to nor installed separately. It shows up in Snapchat's chat list like one more contact. The door of entry is not the chatbot's, it is the app's.

The age that counts is Snapchat's

Snap's terms put it as a two-level rule: the services are not directed to children under 13, nor to anyone below the applicable minimum age in their state, province or country if that age is higher than 13. My AI does not add a second age gate on top. If you have an account, the assistant is in the list.

What is different: what stays saved

This is the part almost nobody reads, and it is the one that actually affects a family. Snap explains it in its own help centre: what you share with My AI is kept, and those stored interactions are used to improve the assistant and personalise the experience. It is not a chat that disappears like the others in the app.

All the content you share with My AI is retained until you delete it.

The three switches that actually exist

• Delete your My AI data. On iOS: Profile icon, gear icon for Settings, Privacy Controls, Delete Data, Delete My AI Data, then confirm. On Android: Profile icon, gear icon, Account Actions, Delete My AI Data, then confirm. Snap notes that deletion from its servers can take up to 30 days.
• Take the conversation out of the Chat feed. Press and hold on My AI to open Chat and Notification Settings, where you can unpin the conversation or clear it from the Chat feed. Snap is explicit that clearing removes the thread from view but does not delete data already shared.
• Turn My AI off through Family Center. If you are linked to your teenager's account, Family Center has a setting to disable My AI. With it on, Snap says My AI will not store or process your teen's queries, nor reply to their messages.

It is worth reading those three switches side by side, because they do different jobs and are easy to mix up. One deletes the history, one only hides it, and the third turns the assistant off. Only the last one changes what happens from tomorrow.

What this means at home

The conversation is not about banning Snapchat. It is about a distinction teenagers grasp immediately once it is said out loud: that chat list contains people, and it contains a service. With people you rely on trust, with a service you rely on terms. Snap itself advises against sharing confidential or sensitive information with My AI, and that sentence, coming from the company, carries more weight than ten warnings from an adult. We have written separately about what never to tell an AI and about the privacy settings that genuinely matter.

And if they are already using it

Almost certainly yes, because nobody had to go looking: it was simply there when the app opened. The practical move is to sit down together once and work through the three items in order. Look at what is stored, decide whether to delete it, and decide whether to leave it switched on. A quarter of an hour and a decision made together beat a ban that nobody is going to check.