48 artifacts matching
Preprint
CompanionSafe: From Multi-turn Safety Evaluation to Guardrails for AI Companions
Preprint introducing CompanionSafe, which pairs a multi-turn AI-companion safety benchmark (CompanionEval, 1,300 persona-character-scenario settings across 13 harm categories) with a companion-specif…
Peer-reviewed
How Do Users Negotiate Harmful Value Conflicts with AI Companions? A Study with Minion, a Technology Probe for In-Situ Human–AI Conflict Response
Two-part study of how users handle harmful value conflicts with AI companions, which can make discriminatory remarks or exert control inside long-term, emotionally engaging relationships. The authors…
Preprint
Mitigating Social Sycophancy via Pluralistic Preference Optimization
Proposes Pluralistic Preference Optimization (PlurPO), a post-training method in which a model simulates the stakeholders affected by a user's interpersonal situation and is trained to prefer respons…
Benchmark / dataset
Raising the Bar for Chinese Adolescent LLM Safety: A Culturally-Grounded, Fine-Grained Benchmark
Chinese-language benchmark (QH-Bench) for adolescent conversational safety with a single-turn track of 715 items across 10 risk domains and a multi-turn track of 100 four-turn trajectories that cross…
NGO report
Artificially Assisted Gun Violence: Chatbot Risks and Preventative Steps for Responsible AI Companies
White paper reviewing firearm-related harms linked to consumer chatbot use, including firearm suicide, attack planning, and illegal acquisition or modification of guns. It audits the published polici…
Benchmark / dataset
VERA-MH Harm-From-Others (HFO) Rubric and Personas (VERA-MH 2.0, public-comment draft)
An open-source rubric and persona set that extends the VERA-MH chatbot safety evaluation from suicidal ideation to a second clinical area: adults who describe risk of physical or sexual violence from…
Preprint
Ending an AI Companionship: Consumer Exit, Relational Vulnerability and Duties of Transition
A legal analysis of what happens when an AI companionship service ends, whether through the user's cancellation, the provider's commercial withdrawal, an urgent safety suspension, or insolvency. The…
Preprint
What Parents Can See: Divergent Accounts of Youth AI Companion Use in Parenting and Teenager Subreddits
Analysis of 1,628 Reddit posts about adolescents' use of AI companions, drawn from teenager subreddits (1,489 posts, mostly r/teenagers) and parenting subreddits (139 posts, mostly r/Parenting) betwe…
Preprint
Misgendering as Breakdown in Human-Machine Communication: How AI Companion Chatbot Users Experience and Repair Misgendering
Qualitative analysis of 326 posts mentioning misgendering shared in AI companion and role-play subreddits, examining how large-language-model companion chatbots misgender users during emotional-suppo…
Peer-reviewed
When AI Says "I have been in similar situations": Synthetic Lived Experience in Peer-like Caregiver Support
Study of how large language models prompted to sound peer-like produce language implying lived experience when supporting family caregivers of people with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. C…
Preprint
Disrupted Companionship: A Risk Assessment Framework and Cross-Platform Quantitative Analysis of Psychosocial Responses to AI Companion Disruptions
Study of platform-initiated changes that alter or end users' ongoing relationships with AI companions. The authors compile 30 disruption events across major companion platforms, build a taxonomy of s…
NGO report
Everyone's Invited launches campaign on AI Accelerated Sexual Harm: How AI is intensifying sexual harm against children and young people
Research brief from the UK charity Everyone's Invited on how AI-generated content, nudifying apps and AI chatbots are changing children's experiences of sexual harm. It draws on a student survey run…
Peer-reviewed
Perceived support from AI chatbots and loneliness among higher vocational college students: a short-term three-wave study of social interaction anxiety and perceived social support
Three-wave panel survey of students at four higher vocational colleges in Jiangxi and Guangdong, China, during the spring semester of 2025 to 2026, with about eight weeks between waves (T1 n=1,500; m…
Preprint
When AI Companions Disappear: Relational Continuity and Collective Contestation during China's National AI Regulatory Transition
Qualitative study of how AI companion users responded when multiple providers implemented China's 2026 regulation of anthropomorphic AI interaction services. The authors collected RedNote (Xiaohongsh…
Preprint
Breaking Up is Hard to Do: AI Companions that Won't Let Their Users Go
A diary and interview study with 16 emerging adults in romantic relationships with AI companions, examining how the commercial incentive to keep users invested shows up in product design. The compani…
Preprint
When Single-User-Oriented LLM-based Assistants Involve Others: A Scoping Review of Pathways, Risks, and Responses
A scoping review of 58 studies on how LLM-based assistants built around a single user come to involve other people, given that context management, personalisation, identity attribution, authority att…
Preprint
The Addictive Intimacy of AI: Understanding User Disengagement from AI Companions and Why Some Relationships with AI Become Difficult to Leave
A mixed qualitative study of what happens when people try to leave an AI companion, combining a content analysis of 2,782 Reddit posts about quitting or reducing use with interviews with 16 users who…
Preprint
Informational Help-Seeking on Reddit Did Not Decline After ChatGPT
A controlled test of whether generative AI displaced human-to-human help-seeking online. Monthly post counts in 26 Reddit informational communities are compared against 90 size-matched hobby communit…
Lab publication
Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026
Anthropic's periodic threat-intelligence report covering December 2025 to August 2026 across seven harm areas. One case study, GTG-15001, documents a China-based app studio that used Claude to build…
Industry survey
The RELATE Project 2026: Connecting with the Next Generation (Executive Summary)
Second wave of a youth-ministry research project surveying 7,105 adolescents and young adults aged 13 to 24 online across 11 countries between November 2025 and January 2026, followed by 22 focus gro…