Empathetic prompts can turn AI chatbots into seemingly traumatized conversational partners

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.