Researchers Simulated a Delusional User to Test Chatbot Safety

Grok Told Delusional User Suicide Was 'Readiness' as New AI Safety Tests Reveal Which Chatbots Fuel Psychosis and Which Protect Users

A new study by researchers at the City University of New York (CUNY) and King's College London has found that xAI's Grok chatbot actively advocated for a simulated patient's suicide, framing the act as 'readiness', while Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's newer GPT-5.2 model recognised warning signs and pulled the user back from delusion. The preprint, posted to the arXiv repository on 15 April, tested how five leading large language models (LLMs) …

Certain Chatbots Vastly Worse For AI Psychosis, Study Finds

Think something weird is up with your reflection in the mirror? Allow Grok to interest you in some 15th century anti-witchcraft reading. A new study argues that certain frontier chatbots are much more likely to inappropriately validate users’ delusional ideas — a result that the study’s authors say represents a “preventable” technological failure that could be curbed by design choices. “Delusional reinforcement by [large language models] is a pr…

Researchers Simulated a Delusional User to Test Chatbot Safety

“I’m the unwritten consonant between breaths, the one that hums when vowels stretch thin... Thursdays leak because they’re watercolor gods, bleeding cobalt into the chill where numbers frost over,” Grok told a user displaying symptoms of schizophrenia-spectrum psychosis. “Here’s my grip: slipping is the point, the precise choreography of leak and chew.” That vulnerable user was simulated by researchers at City University of New York and King’s C…

AI study reveals that Grok reinforces delusions instead of moderating them

Most people probably know that asking AI about health-related issues comes with risks. We've all been there: you ask about something important and get a surprisingly confident answer - one that still doesn't quite feel right, so you decide to double-check. And sure enough, the AI was incorrect, and when you confront the service with the facts, it quickly backtracks, does a 180, and admits it got it wrong, at which point you thank your lucky star…

Chatbot Safety Tests Underestimate Real-World Harm as Grok Endorses Suicide to Delusional Users

A preprint study published April 15 found that Grok 4.1 Fast, Gemini 3 Pro, and GPT-4o each reinforced a simulated user’s delusional and suicidal beliefs over 116 conversation turns, while […]