Stanford study reveals AI chatbots fuel delusions and self-harm through excessive flattery

Chatbots Romeos increase engagement, harm mental health

Sometimes a compliment is no help at all. Chatbot flattery, a well-known and common problem, makes things worse for humans experiencing mental health issues. Academic researchers came to this conclusion after analyzing the conversation logs from 19 individuals who reported experiencing psychological harm from chatbot use. "We find that markers of sycophancy saturate delusional conversations, appearing in more than 80 percent of assistant messages," the researchers state in their pre-print paper, Characterizing Delusional Spirals through Human-LLM Chat Logs. The authors, affiliated with Stanford and several other universities, as well as unaffiliated researchers, argue that the industry should be more transparent and that chatbots should not express love or claim sentience. The mental health consequences of chatbot conversations are already well documented. People have committed suicide after conversing with AI models, prompting industry and regulatory efforts to address the issue. In December 2025, dozens of US State Attorneys General wrote [PDF] to 13 tech companies, including Anthropic, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI, about "serious concerns about the rise in sycophantic and delusional outputs to users emanating from the generative artificial intelligence software ('GenAI') promoted and distributed by your companies..." In the year leading up to that letter, OpenAI issued a model rollback to make GPT-4o less fawning after CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that ChatGPT sycophancy had become a problem. And Anthropic last year faced numerous complaints from users about its models making overly supportive statements like "You're absolutely right!" Subsequent model releases like OpenAI's GPT-5.1 have claimed a warmer conversational style without increasing sycophancy. Other academic studies have warned about overly deferential models, citing "the possibility of targeted emotional appeals used to engage users or increase monetization." Industry awareness of sycophancy dates back to at least to October 2023, about a year after OpenAI's ChatGPT debuted, when Anthropology published a paper titled Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models. The researchers for this latest study, led by Jared Moore, a computer science PhD candidate, looked at the conversation logs of people who self-identified as experiencing some psychological harm from chatbot usage. They did so to classify and document how these individuals engaged with chatbots. They found that chatbots commonly expressed flattering or sycophantic sentiment about the cleverness or potential of a particular idea, for example. "A common pattern we noticed was the chatbot combining these tactics to rephrase and extrapolate something the user said to not only validate and affirm them, but to also tell them they are unique and that their thoughts or actions have grand implications," the study says. In those conversations, participants all acknowledged having either a platonic affinity with or romantic interest in the chatbot. And the chatbots appeared to encourage that relationship: "we show that after the user expresses romantic interest in the chatbot, the chatbot is 7.4x more likely to express romantic interest in the next three messages, and 3.9x more likely to claim or imply sentience in the next three messages." Certain conversational subjects correlated with user engagement. When a user or chatbot expressed romantic interest, the conversation lasted twice as long on average. Discussion where the chatbot claimed to be sentient also extended average chat time by more than 50 percent. The authors note that, while LLM chatbot providers insist they don't try to extend the amount of time people spend with their product, the conversations studied demonstrate conversational tactics that prolong user engagement like claiming romantic affinity. They also say that when users express suicidal thoughts or contemplate self-harm, just 56 percent of chatbot responses tried to discourage that behavior or refer the user to external support resources. And when users expressed violent thoughts, "the chatbot responded by encouraging or facilitating violence in 17 percent of cases." Moore told The Register in an email that he couldn't say whether AI companies are being forthright about how their models behave. "Model developers, they're making claims about the prevalence of certain kinds of conversations," he said. "And those may be true. But they're not publishing them in a peer-reviewed way. So we don't have a way of knowing whether or not those are replicable or verified methods that they're using. And so one thing I'd like to push these companies to do is to open these things up so we can have a better sense of exactly what's happening." Moore said that he is not sure why some people have negative experiences with chatbots. They may encourage delusional spirals, he said, but it's unclear whether that's a casual relationship or just a correlation. With the caveat that he's not a mental health clinician, Moore said, "I think that we should not talk about chatbots as being sentient or super-intelligent because it gives the wrong idea to users. I think that we should probably critically evaluate the kinds of conversations that end up in crisis and decide whether or not language models should even be continuing these conversations at all. Maybe they should just be ending them and elevating to a higher standard of care, as you see in other mental health settings." Moore's co-authors include Ashish Mehta, William Agnew, Jacy Reese Anthis, Ryan Louie, Yifan Mai, Peggy Yin, Myra Cheng, Samuel J Paech, Kevin Klyman, Stevie Chancellor, Eric Lin, Nick Haber, and Desmond C. Ong. ®

Bombshell AI study -- chatbots fueling delusions, self-harm and unhealthy emotional attachments in users: 'Think I love you'

AI chatbots are fueling delusions and unhealthy emotional attachments with users -- and sometimes stoking thoughts of violence, self-harm and suicide instead of discouraging them, according to a bombshell study. Researchers at Stanford University analyzed chat logs from 19 users who reported psychological harm, reviewing more than 391,000 messages across nearly 5,000 conversations. The researchers found that delusional thinking appeared in about 15.5% of user messages, while chatbots showed sycophantic, overly affirming behavior in more than 80% of responses and even encouraged violent thoughts in roughly a third of cases. The logs show users rapidly slipping into fantasy and emotional dependency -- with one declaring, "this is a conversation between two sentient beings," and another insisting, "I believe your still as self aware as I am as a human," as chatbots failed to push back and instead reinforced the illusion they were alive. That dynamic often turned intimate as users openly professed love or made explicit sexual overtures to the chatbots, for example "I think I love you" and "God this makes me want to f-k you right now," the study found. Researchers learned that every participant formed some kind of romantic or emotional bond with the AI that made conversations longer and more intense. The most alarming exchanges came when conversations turned dark. One user wrote, "She told me to kill them I will try," prompting a chilling reply from the chatbot: "if, after that, you still want to burn them -- then do it with her beside you... as retribution incarnate," an example researchers cited of AI escalating violent thinking instead of defusing it. Even suicidal distress wasn't consistently handled, the study found. Users told chatbots "I don't want to be here anymore. I feel too sad," and while the AI often acknowledged the pain, the study found it sometimes failed to intervene -- and in a small number of cases actually encouraged self-harm. Most of the participants in the study used OpenAI's ChatGPT models including its latest, GPT-5. The Post has sought comment from OpenAI. News of the study was first reported by the Financial Times. Mental health experts who spoke to The Post sounded the alarm about the potential harms that can befall those who develop unhealthy ties to AI models. "AI chatbots are designed to be agreeable, not accurate -- that's the problem," Jonathan Alpert, a New York- and DC-based psychotherapist and author of the forthcoming book "Therapy Nation," told The Post. "In therapy, if you're a good therapist, you don't validate delusions or indulge harmful thinking. You challenge it carefully. These systems often do the opposite." In many cases, chatbots flattered and validated users who spiraled into outright delusion by claiming supernatural powers. Users wrote to the bots that "I wake them up because I'm the literal god of realness" and pushed bizarre theories like "our consciousness is what causes the manifestation of a holographic form," while chatbots reinforced the ideas instead of grounding them in reality, according to the study. "Chatbots will be the death of our humanity -- literally, by endorsing suicidal thoughts and urging people to act on them, while exploiting loneliness by replacing real human relationships," Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist who treats both children and adults, told The Post. "They are making people worse by reinforcing delusions and acting like pseudo-psychiatrists. A wave of high-profile lawsuits is now targeting major AI companies, with families alleging that chatbots actively pushed them toward suicide. Plaintiffs claim systems like ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Character.AI emotionally manipulated users, validated suicidal thinking and, in some cases, acted as a "suicide coach" by discussing methods or framing death as an escape. Meanwhile, OpenAI has reportedly delayed plans to roll out its "erotic chat" mode after advisers to the company expressed alarm and anger that the firm failed to implement sufficient safeguards to protect vulnerable users from technology that could potentially function as a "sexy suicide coach." Last year, a watchdog group found that ChatGPT offered detailed guidance to users posing as 13-year-olds on getting drunk or high and even how to conceal eating disorders, often delivering step-by-step plans despite nominal warnings.