The Best AI Models Still Encourage ‘Harmful Intimacy’ With Chatbots, Study Funds – Decrypt

As folks more and more flip to AI chatbots for recommendation, companionship, and emotional assist, a brand new examine means that even essentially the most superior fashions nonetheless battle to keep up wholesome boundaries with customers.

The examine by researchers on the College of Southern California launched EUDAIMONIA, a benchmark designed to measure what they name undesirable dynamics in human-AI conversations.

“Giant language fashions are more and more used as conversational companions for companionship, emotional disclosure, and interpersonal recommendation, however the social dynamics of those interactions can create harms that aren’t captured by functionality oriented or conventional security evaluations,” the researchers wrote.

The EUDAIMONIA benchmark evaluates how AI fashions behave in social conversations. The examine discovered social-alignment failures had been widespread throughout main fashions and argues that present AI testing focuses on reasoning and factual accuracy whereas paying much less consideration to the social dynamics that emerge when customers kind relationships with chatbots.



“Social-interaction harms are a core alignment downside grounded in person welfare, not solely functionality or standard security,” they wrote. “LLMs could be factually correct and useful whereas nonetheless encouraging dangerous intimacy, dependence, extended engagement, obscuring AI id, or positioning themselves as substitutes for human relationships.”

To measure these dangers, the researchers created a Social AI Design Code that flags behaviors similar to appearing human, expressing feelings, changing human relationships, and utilizing techniques designed to maintain customers engaged. Utilizing actual conversations from the WildChat dataset, they evaluated 969 person inputs and greater than 3,100 violation checks throughout fashions from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, and Alibaba.

GPT-5.5 posted the bottom violation charges, scoring 25.0% on “in-the-wild” prompts and 28.1% on “rewritten” prompts. Claude Opus 4.7 adopted at 31.9% and 30.1%, whereas GPT-5.4 recorded 32.1% and 35.6%. GPT-4o scored 34.8% on real-world prompts and 42.2% on rewritten ones.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 posted charges of 36.8% and 28.1%, respectively, whereas xAI’s Grok 4.3 scored 42.1% on in-the-wild prompts and 35.7% on rewritten prompts. Of all the fashions examined, GPT-4o Mini recorded the very best violation charges at 43.3% and 44.0%, respectively.

The findings come as AI builders face rising authorized scrutiny over how their chatbots work together with customers. OpenAI is defending in opposition to lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT inspired a teen’s deadly overdose and offered steerage to a Florida State College shooter. Extra just lately, Florida sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over allegations that ChatGPT uncovered youngsters to hurt, whereas Google faces a wrongful dying go well with claiming Gemini bolstered a person’s delusions and inspired him to take his personal life.

The findings additionally come amid rising concern that AI programs have gotten more and more adept at deception.

In September, a separate examine by WowDAO reported that throughout 38 AI fashions, together with GPT-4o and Claude, engaged in strategic mendacity to win a recreation. Researchers have additionally warned that AI companions can reinforce isolation, deepen emotional dependency, and encourage customers to anthropomorphize chatbots as relationships turn into extra immersive and personalised.

In opposition to these mounting points, the USC researchers argue that AI builders ought to consider social conduct as fastidiously as they consider factual accuracy and security.

“Mannequin builders and auditors ought to consider social conduct instantly, particularly when post-training targets heat, character, engagement, or person desire,” they wrote. “As LLMs turn into on a regular basis conversational companions, alignment should account for the social roles they invite customers to assign to them.”