Criancas e jovens (9-17 anos) e Inteligencia Artificial Generativa em Portugal

Key Findings

• — 85% of Portuguese children aged 9 to 17 used generative AI tools, including 78% of 9 to 11 year olds.
• — About a quarter use it for emotional and personal support, ten points above the European average of 15%.
• — Girls exceed boys on both talking to AI about physical health and wellbeing and about things that worry them: 23% against 15% on each.
• — Task use also skews female: summarising or explaining texts 48% of girls against 35% of boys, writing school texts 47% against 33%, creating images and video 30% against 25%.
• — 15% are non-users, skewing male (53% to 47%), younger (36% aged 9 to 11) and from lower-education households (21% against 11%).
• — The report flags a compensation dynamic in the qualitative data: apparent wellbeing accompanied by insecurity, guilt and anxiety about losing control of time.

Methodology Notes

n = 2,111 children aged 9 to 17, fielded May to December 2025 with a school-based primary-sampling-unit design; the qualitative component covered 13 to 17 year old AI users and ran November 2024 to February 2025. Portuguese-language document; all measures self-report. The document itself states only '(2026)' and leaves its DOI blank, so published_date uses the PDF creation date of 2026-02-09, corroborated by national press the following day; day precision is therefore inferred, not stated. The 59-page PDF (1,991,118 bytes) was downloaded and the figures verified in the text.

Sources