Who's behind Noodle, and why we built it.

Children are meeting AI anyway, and most of it was never made for them. Ask Noodle is: a child asks, Noodle answers at their level and teaches them to ask well, and their grown-up sees every chat, with one exception, in the Kitchen, your parent dashboard. UK only for now, and built around the Children's Code.

Built in the UK by Sam Marsh, a parent who works in Internet infrastructure.

Join the waiting list Why we built it

A parent and two children at the kitchen table, smiling down at Noodle waving from his bowl, beside a child's dinosaur drawing, pencils, toast and a mug of tea

The problem

Children didn't wait for a version of AI built for them. They are using the adult ones.

An adult assistant

Grown-up answersAsk about sex, drugs, religion or anything else, and an eight-year-old gets the answer a forty-year-old would.
Does the homeworkIt hands over the finished essay.
No house rulesIt can't follow your family's.
Nobody finds outWhen a child types something worrying, nobody at home hears.

Most teenagers, and many younger children, already use AI, and the most popular tool among them is in an app made for teenagers and adults¹.

The parent's choice today

Ban itand the skill goes unlearned.

Allow itunsupervised, and hope for the best.

Feb2026

The law is catching up. The government said it would bring AI chatbots under the Online Safety Act² and consult on restricting children's use of them, with new powers to act within months rather than years.

A product built around children's safety from the start can meet those rules without rebuilding. That is how Noodle was built.

1 Ofcom, Online Nation, November 2023: 79% of online 13 to 17 year olds and 40% of online 7 to 12 year olds had used generative AI
2 UK Government, 15 February 2026

Who's behind it

Ask Noodle is built and run in the UK by Sam Marsh, a parent with a career in Internet infrastructure, and it started as the thing Sam wanted for the children at home: AI they could learn with, that a grown-up could see, and that wouldn't do their homework for them.

It is deliberately small. We check every line on this site against the app and correct it when we're wrong, every safety change is tested before it ships, and every family in the beta can email a person who will answer.

If you'd like to talk, whether you're a parent, a school, a researcher, a journalist or someone who wants to help build it, write to hello@asknoodle.ai. Found a security problem? security@asknoodle.ai.

Free for up to three children aged 6 to 15. Every safety feature, on every plan.

Join the waiting list

What we believe

Four things, and every promise we make follows from them.

Asking well is a life skill.

The children who learn to ask AI a clear question, read what comes back and notice when it's wrong will have a head start at school and at work.
Safety is not something you charge for.

Every safety check, every house rule and every alert is on the free plan exactly as it is on the paid one, and the Family plan pays for the extras, never for a child being safer.
The grown-up is in charge, and the child knows.

Nothing is watched in secret, and if that costs us a sign-up from a family who wanted a hidden monitor, we can live with that.
We want to know as little about you as possible.

A first name and an age band, chats deleted on a schedule, never sold and never used to train AI: that isn't a policy we'll tidy up later, it's how it's built.

Where we've got to

As of November 2026. We'd rather tell you what isn't built than let you find out. Ticks are built and running; the numbers are what comes next, in the order we'll do it, with no dates until they're set.

The child appOne chat for questions, homework and stories, Talk to Noodle and Read it to me, My Noodle, Picture Pal, Story Book, lessons in asking well, and games that open as a child learns.
The KitchenThe chats, alerts, house rules per child, quiet hours, a word list, devices, other grown-ups, the Sunday email.
The safety checksOn every question and every answer, with a red-team set run and signed off before any change to them goes live.
A private betaBuilt and ready for the first families from the waiting list.
Open the doorsThe privacy notice and beta terms finalised, the Data Protection Impact Assessment independently reviewed, then the whole waiting list invited.
BillingPayments aren't open yet. Every new family gets two weeks of Family free, then Free until the Family plan goes on sale.
A schools pilotA handful of schools, priced per pupil, with the same checks and a teacher's view.
PhonesAn iPhone and iPad app is on its way. Noodle works in any modern web browser today.

And it isn't just a UK problem.

Children everywhere are using the same adult tools, and the rules for children and AI are arriving in every market we would go to next.

Children using AI, pupils and the rules arriving, by market
Market	Children using AI	In school	Rules arriving
United States	64%of 13 to 17 year olds use AI chatbots, about 3 in 10 every day¹	49.4mpupils in public schools²	In forceCalifornia's companion chatbot law, January 2026³ InquiryThe FTC is asking seven AI firms how they protect children⁴
European Union	7 in 10children aged 9 to 16 across Europe use generative AI⁵	60.7mpupils in primary and secondary school⁶	In forceAI Act: chatbots must say they are AI, from August 2026⁷ ProposedEU KIDS Act names AI companions and chatbots for under-18s⁸
Ireland	43%of 9 to 17 year olds used generative AI in the past month⁹	975kpupils in primary and post-primary school¹⁰	In forceA digital age of consent of 16, plus everything the EU asks¹¹
Australia	4 in 5children aged 10 to 17 have used an AI assistant¹²	4.16mschool students¹³	In forceIndustry codes covering AI companion chatbots, March 2026¹⁴ In forceNo social media accounts under 16, December 2025¹⁵
Canada	1 in 5Ontario students in grades 4 to 12 have used generative AI for emotional support¹⁶	6.0mpupils in elementary and secondary school¹⁷	ProposedBill C-34 would put a duty on AI chatbots to protect children¹⁸ ProposedA children's privacy code, out for comment¹⁹
New Zealand	9 in 10people aged 13 to 24 used generative AI in the past six months²⁰	856kschool students²¹	ProposedA bill would put AI companions behind a 16+ age check; it waits on November's election²²

More than 120 million pupils are in school across these markets, as each country counts them. The rules differ, but between them they keep asking for the same things: a chatbot that says it is AI, care for a child at risk, design that suits a child's age and a grown-up in the loop. That is what Noodle is built around.

We start in the UK on purpose, so the data and safety work is done properly for one country before the next. Ireland and the rest of the EU already have rules close to the UK's on children's data and design, Australia is already enforcing its own, and the US, Canada and New Zealand are writing theirs now, several of them still as proposals.

Figures as each source published them. The 120 million is our sum of each market's pupils, with Ireland inside the EU's.