DAK-Suchtstudie: KI-Chatbots erhöhen riskanten Medienkonsum bei Kindern und Jugendlichen

DAK-Gesundheit, one of the largest German health insurers, runs an annual study of media addiction among children and adolescents with the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. The eighth wave, conducted in autumn 2025 with about a thousand parent–child pairs aged 10–17, covered AI chatbots for the first time.

More than a quarter of minors use ChatGPT-type apps several times a week; from age fifteen, more than half at least weekly. Up to about a tenth of children and adolescents turn to chatbots to distract themselves from bad feelings. Among the young with depressive symptoms the figures jump: nearly 33% confide things to a chatbot they would tell no one, and as many believe the chatbot understands them better than a real person. In the background: 21.5% of 10–17-year-olds use social media problematically, 6.6% meet addiction criteria.

The value of the entry: data from a neighbouring country, gathered by a health payer with a clinic rather than a university with a hypothesis to defend; children and parents asked separately. For parents the lesson is that the child in the worse mental state is the one soonest to take the machine for the only one who understands. Caveat: a cross-sectional survey; a press release, with the full report held by DAK.