Is an AI chess coach safe for kids?

An AI chess coach can be a wonderful thing for a child: endlessly patient, there whenever they want a game, and happy to explain the same idea a fifth time. But "AI" and "children" in one sentence rightly makes parents ask questions. This is the list we'd want answered before handing an app to our own children, followed by how Walnut Chess answers it.

What to look for

Whichever app you choose, these are the questions worth asking:

• Who owns the account? A grown-up should set it up and stay in charge of it, with the child playing on it, not the other way round.
• Can your child talk to strangers? Chat with other players, open friend requests and public profiles are where most of the risk in online games lives.
• Are there ads? Ads aimed at children, or ads that track them across the web, have no place in a learning app.
• What is kept, and can you delete it? You should be able to find out what the app stores and remove all of it.
• Does the AI stay on topic? A chess coach should talk about chess, explain things simply, and never ask a child for personal details.
• Can your child switch the safety settings off? If a single tap undoes them, they aren't really settings for a parent.

How Walnut Chess does it

A grown-up sets it up. A parent or guardian creates the account. In the first chat, the coach asks who will be playing. Answering "a child" brings one more question: the grown-up confirms that they are the child's parent or guardian, and only then does kids mode switch on.

Kids mode stays on. Switching kids mode off in Settings asks for the account password, so a child can't turn it off by themselves.

No strangers. Kids accounts don't appear when other players search for friends and can't be sent a friend request by username, and there is no chat between players anywhere in Walnut Chess. A child can only add a friend through an invite link. The only one your child talks to is the coach.

No ads. There are none in Walnut Chess, for anyone. Google Analytics, which we use to count visits to our public pages, isn't loaded inside the app at all.

A coach that keeps to chess. In kids mode the coach is told it is talking to a child between 5 and 12. It keeps to chess, uses short sentences and everyday words, never asks for personal details, and if a child says something worrying, it gently tells them to talk to a grown-up they trust. Its chess is checked by Stockfish, the open-source engine, so it doesn't make things up about the position.

What we keep. Your child's games, puzzles, lessons and their chats with the coach, so the coaching can build on what they've done. Our privacy policy sets out exactly what is stored and why.

You can delete it all. A parent can delete the account from Settings, and everything in it goes with it.

What no app can do for you

Settings are a floor, not a ceiling. The best safety feature is still a grown-up nearby: keep the device somewhere shared, look at what your child is playing now and then, and ask them what the coach told them today. With chess, that last one is a pleasure anyway. Children love explaining the trick they just learned.

Try it together

The first session is the best time to see for yourself. Set up the account side by side, answer the coach's first question together, and play a game against one of the animal friends. You'll know within ten minutes whether it's right for your family. Everything about kids mode is on our kids page, and it's free, like the rest of Walnut Chess.