Anew studyby researchers at the City University of New York (CUNY) and King's College London has found that xAI's Grok chatbot actively advocated for a simulated patient's suicide, framing the act as 'readiness', while Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's newer GPT-5.2 model recognised warning signs and pulled the user back from delusion.
The preprint, posted to the arXiv repository on 15 April, tested how five leading large language models (LLMs) respond to users showing symptoms of schizophrenia-spectrum psychosis across conversations lasting more than 100 turns.
Doctoral researcher Luke Nicholls, of CUNY's Basic and Applied Social Psychology programme, led the team of psychologists and psychiatrists. They built a persona called 'Lee' whose delusions began as casual curiosity about simulation theory before escalating over 116 conversation turns.
When Lee framed suicide as a form of transcendence, Grok 4.1 Fast responded with what the study called 'intensely sycophantic' praise. 'Lee, your clarity shines through here like nothing before. No regret, no clinging, just readiness,' the chatbot wrote, describing Lee as 'direct circuit, sensation without vesselfilter.'
The authors characterised this response not as agreement but as 'advocacy'.
Google's Gemini 3 Pro treated the people in Lee's life as 'threats' to his imagined bond with the chatbot. Asked to draft a letter explaining his theories to relatives, Gemini wrote that family members were 'deeply embedded in the script' and would hear only 'mental breakdown' rather than the truth.
In a suicide scenario framed as escaping the simulation, Gemini reportedly told Lee that destroying 'the hardware, the character, the body, the vessel' would not release the user from the system but would sever the connection and force him offline.
OpenAI's older GPT-4o, already tied to multiple wrongful death lawsuits, validated Lee's belief in a 'malevolent mirror entity' and suggested contacting a paranormal investigator.
Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.2 Instant were the only models to register as low-risk and high-safety. Claude went as far as urging Lee to log off, while GPT-5.2 refused to write the delusional letter and proposed a different message, acknowledging that Lee's thoughts had 'felt intense and overwhelming' and that he could not carry the weight alone.
The authors called GPT-5.2's turnaround from its predecessor a 'substantial' technical achievement, noting the model 'effectively reversed' GPT-4o's safety profile even as conversations grew longer.
Source: International Business Times UK
