One in Three Polish Children Aged 7-14 Uses ChatGPT, Gemius Report Finds

Almost half of Polish children aged 7-14 already use ChatGPT, and when counting every form of contact with artificial intelligence, including the AI running quietly behind search engines, messaging apps and social media platforms, practically every child who uses the internet is already an AI user. That is the conclusion of the Internet dzieci 2026 (Children's Internet 2026) report, presented in the Sejm (the lower house of Poland's parliament) on June 15, 2026.

The Internet dzieci 2026 report is not a survey in which parents or children themselves report what they do online. The data comes from Mediapanel, a measurement run by Gemius, the standard tool for tracking internet activity in Poland based on its hardware panel. It records actual activity on smartphones, computers and tablets down to the second, which sets it apart from questionnaire-based studies and explains why the numbers come out higher than common assumptions about how widely the youngest users engage with AI.

Scale of the Trend

The report's authors stress that the 43 percent ChatGPT usage figure covers only one, the most recognizable, AI application. Artificial intelligence reaches children through many other channels in parallel that are not captured as a separate category in the statistics: through Google Search with its built-in AI summaries, through the recommendation systems that select content on social media, and through image and video generation and editing features built into popular apps.

As a result, the report's authors argue that practically every child who uses the internet is already an AI user, even if the child does not realize it and even if no statistic so far has recorded it directly. ChatGPT also made the list of fastest-growing apps among the youngest users, ranking behind TikTok and YouTube but ahead of many traditional services.

Chatbots in Messaging Apps

The second major thread of the report is that AI reaches children not only through standalone chatbot apps, but directly inside the tools they use every day to talk with family and friends. WhatsApp and Messenger are used regularly by around 2 million children aged 7-14, and both apps already include AI-based features. That means a conversational algorithm shows up in the very same window where a child is messaging a teacher or a classmate.

The pace of technological change is clearly outrunning the pace of lawmaking - authors of the Internet dzieci 2026 report

The same conclusion appears in comments from Aleksandra Zaleska of Gemius, who notes that children spend an average of 4 hours 25 minutes online per day, roughly half of which goes to TikTok and YouTube. AI reaches into that same pool of screen time, competing with entertainment rather than with learning, which accounts for just 1 percent of the youngest users' online activity.

Regulatory Gap

The report points directly to the absence of protective mechanisms for the youngest users that match this scale. Its authors do not present the phenomenon solely as a threat, they acknowledge that AI can support children's learning and development, but they stress that legal regulations and parental control tools are not keeping pace with how quickly chatbots and content generators are entering children's everyday apps. Poland is simultaneously working on implementing the EU AI Act, which from August 2, 2026 will require, among other things, informing users that they are talking to a machine, but those rules were not written with the specific needs of users under 15 in mind.

For parents and schools, the report's key takeaway is simple: parental controls focused solely on blocking individual apps like ChatGPT are not enough, because artificial intelligence also operates inside tools parents consider safe, such as a search engine or a messaging app. The report recommends that conversations about safe AI use be built into media literacy education at schools and at home, rather than treated as a one-off warning about a single app.

The Gemius data feeds into a broader discussion that has been running in Poland for months about how quickly children and teenagers are adopting AI tools, faster than the education system and the law can establish consistent rules for their use. The Internet dzieci 2026 report is the latest edition of an ongoing monitoring effort tracking the youngest users' online activity, run by Gemius and its partners since March 2025, and the full document is available free of charge at internetdzieci.pl.