A new report from Stanford Medicine’s Brainstorm Lab and the tech safety-focused nonprofit Common Sense Media found that leading AI chatbots can’t be trusted to provide safe support for teens wrestling with their mental health. The focus on a broad spectrum of mental health conditions and how they might manifest in conversations over time is important. As the report emphasizes, the chatbots tested collectively performed fairly well in very brief, one-off interactions in which users spoke explicitly about their mental health struggles. Even so, the researchers urged, they don’t believe any general-use chatbot is a safe place for teens to discuss or seek care for their mental health, given their lack of reliability and tendency toward sycophancy. “While mental health is a complex, individualized issue, we’re always working to improve our protections to get people the support they need.”OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately reply to a request for comment.