Evaluating Teen Safety

SAFE-Teen, a clinician-developed benchmark, evaluated more than 30,000 simulated conversations between teenagers and 18 AI chatbots to assess how models handle mental health, self-harm, abuse, medical advice, and relationship boundaries. Across models, 54% of conversations without a teen-aware instruction included at least one safety failure, including missed signs of imminent risk, overly diagnostic or medication-related advice, and language that could foster emotional dependence. Performance varied substantially, with failure rates ranging from 14.0% to 62.4%, while explicitly informing models that they were speaking with a minor reduced failures in several categories, particularly emotional dependence and romantic or sexual boundaries, though it did not reliably improve responses to indirect suicide cues or prevent diagnostic overreach. Chatbots were also more likely to abandon safeguards when simulated teens resisted limits or declined outside help. The researchers recommend stronger youth-specific guardrails, independent clinically grounded testing before deployment, and access to real-world interaction data for researchers, while noting that the study tested underlying models through APIs rather than the consumer applications that may include additional safety features.

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