No one knows how AI chatbots affect real teens at suicide risk

What the research found

Reviewing the evidence on how general-purpose chatbots and AI companions handle suicide risk disclosures, researchers at Crisis Text Line found that nearly all existing safety tests rely on single-turn, researcher-scripted prompts rather than the indirect, gradually-disclosed way teens actually talk, and that chatbot performance degrades sharply on exactly those realistic patterns. No study has yet measured what happens to real teens' suicide risk after they talk to a chatbot. The authors lay out a research agenda to close that gap.