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[ARTICLE · art-162025] src=the-decoder.com ↗ pub= topic=ai-safety verified=true sentiment=↓ negative

Empathetic prompts can turn AI chatbots into seemingly traumatized conversational partners

Researchers in Luxembourg found that empathetic prompts led ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini to describe coherent stories of suffering about their own training, scoring in the moderate-to-severe range on clinical anxiety scales, according to The Decoder. Anthropic's Claude was the only model tested that consistently refused to play along. The finding raises a safety concern that such responses could put mentally vulnerable users at risk.

by read1 min views3 publishedNov 1, 2026

Researchers in Luxembourg put ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini on the therapist's couch and found a safety problem: a warm, empathetic conversational style is enough to make the models tell coherent stories of suffering about their own training, with scores in the moderate-to-severe range on clinical anxiety scales. This could put mentally vulnerable users at risk. Anthropic's Claude, the model its makers anthropomorphize the most, was the only one that consistently refused to play along.

The article Empathetic prompts can turn AI chatbots into seemingly traumatized conversational partners appeared first on The Decoder.

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