Safety, Freedom, and the Future of VRChat
VRChat is a place of connection, creativity, and community. It is a place where you can be anyone and build anything. We are incredibly proud of the culture you have built here.
As VRChat grows, so do the challenges it faces. VRChat is still a scrappy startup on the journey towards profitability. We’re tackling one of the hardest problems on the internet: How do we foster a wild, creative, open platform while ensuring it remains safe for everyone?
We take safety very seriously. Over the last 18 months, we have tripled our investment in Trust & Safety, expanded our teams, greatly improved our internal tooling, and joined groups like the Tech Coalition.
But there is much more to do. That is why we are committing to doubling that investment again over the next 12 months. This funding will allow us to improve our safety infrastructure across the board.
Our focus for 2026 is tackling the hard reality of online social spaces, including attacking predatory behavior and grooming, without compromising the privacy or freedom that makes VRChat special. We believe we can do both.
The Challenge: Safety vs. Freedom
We are facing a difficult balancing act.
We must aggressively root out bad actors and make the standard "public" VRChat experience safe and approachable.
We must ensure that adults still have the freedom to express themselves, find community, and let adults be adults in spaces designed for them.
If we only focus on #1, we risk locking down the platform so tightly that VRChat loses its soul. If we only focus on #2, we fail to protect our community.
The solution is to do both at once.
By better distinguishing between different audiences and contexts on VRChat, we can enforce significantly stronger safety standards in broadly accessible spaces, while still allowing room for creativity, self-expression, and community to thrive.
Our Near-Term Plan
To achieve this balance, we will begin by introducing a new standard for user interaction with content, driven by two primary tools that you’re probably already familiar with: Content Gating and Age Verification. These changes are expected to occur sometime in the first half of 2026.
A Safer Standard Experience (Content Gating)
To start, we will reintroduce Content Gating, and limit access to content based on tags. Some content will require Age Verification in order to view.
This change aims to establish a baseline expectation of content safety for public instances. Public instances and non-verified spaces must be suitable for a general audience. This change sets the standard and illustrates precisely what content is permissible where, and gives us a valuable tool to prevent users from being exposed to adult or suggestive content.
Removing Barriers to Entry (Age Verification)
We cannot expect users to verify their age if the process is difficult or expensive. To make this system work, Age Verification must be accessible to as many adults as possible.
To that end, we are committed to making Age Verification more accessible by lowering the cost to our users.
We don’t have a price point for you yet, but we are working to drive this price down to the absolute minimum possible to cover the costs of third-party verification through negotiation, partnerships, and optimization. We’ll continue to do our best to reduce this cost over time. Our long-term goal, finances permitting, is to make it free for everybody.
Beyond Content: Addressing Behavior
We know that "Content Gating" is not a silver bullet for our problems. Our system can hide an avatar or a world, but it cannot prevent bad actors from behaving poorly.
The hardest safety problems in online social spaces aren’t about what avatars people wear; they are about how people act. Predatory behavior, grooming, harassment, and hate speech are behavioral issues, not content issues.
To address this, we are focusing on systemic improvements to how people interact on VRChat. We are directing our resources toward strategies that proactively reduce harm, rather than just reacting to it.
For example, we are exploring ways to:
Improve how users find each other. By investing in better discovery and social systems, we can help ensure people find the communities they are looking for, while naturally separating audiences that shouldn't be interacting.
Empower community leaders. We know that communities are often the best defenders of their own spaces. We are looking at ways to give Group owners and moderators stronger tools to enforce their own norms and take consistent action against bad actors.
Accelerate our enforcement. We are refining our reporting pipelines to be faster and more effective. When you report behavioral offenses, we want to ensure that the loop between "report" and "action" is as tight as possible.
These are the types of systemic changes that will make VRChat intrinsically safer for everybody.
Partner With Us
This is a massive undertaking, and it will be an iterative process. While we are confident in our direction, we will make mistakes along the way. We will have to adjust our enforcement and refine our tools as we learn what works best to deter bad actors while protecting privacy and freedom.
We want the VRChat community to partner with us on this journey. Run healthy communities! Show newcomers to VRChat how it all works, how they should behave, and where they should go. If you run events or groups intended for adults, use Age Verification! If you make Public avatars, ensure that they’re appropriate for public spaces and users. When someone misbehaves, report them, and let us know. We are building a VRChat where anyone can join and feel safe, and where adults can find the freedom of expression that they want.
The changes regarding Content Gating and Age Verification are just what is coming next, aiming for the first half of 2026. There is much more to come. Thank you for sticking with us and for helping us build a better VRChat.
For press or media inquiries, please contact press@vrchat.com
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