Helping people when they need it most

Our approach to AI safety

Ensuring that AI systems are built, deployed, and used safely is critical to our mission.

An update on our safety & security practices

An update on our safety & security practices

Strengthening ChatGPT’s responses in sensitive conversations

OpenAI collaborated with 170+ mental health experts to improve ChatGPT’s ability to recognize distress, respond empathetically, and guide users toward real-world support—reducing unsafe responses by up to 80%. Learn how we’re making ChatGPT safer and more supportive in sensitive moments.

Beyond "I Can't Help With That": How Child Safety Experts Evaluate AI Chatbot Safety

arXiv:2608. 07902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Youth increasingly turn to AI chatbots for social and emotional support, raising concerns about how these systems respond, especially in high-stakes situations.

Safety for Whom? Refusing the Right Subset of a Topic, Not the Whole Topic

OpenAI’s commitment to child safety: adopting safety by design principles

Risk Governance for Generative AI Mental Health Support: A Multi-Turn Safety Architecture

arXiv:2607. 22692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support despite lacking mechanisms to safely govern evolving mental health risk.

Frontier Model Forum

We’re forming a new industry body to promote the safe and responsible development of frontier AI systems: advancing AI safety research, identifying best practices and standards, and facilitating information sharing among policymakers and industry.

Unsafe at any AUC: Unlearned Lessons from Sociotechnical Disasters for Responsible AI

arXiv:2607. 14353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As automated decision-making and data-driven technologies pervade society and are used to manage consequential outcomes, understanding the technology's capabilities, limitations, and attendant risks in context requires analysis of full sociotechnical systems.

Helping ChatGPT better recognize context in sensitive conversations

Learn how new ChatGPT safety updates improve context awareness in sensitive conversations, helping detect risk over time and respond more safely.

A Safety-Gated Multimodal AI Backend for Mental-Health Support: Hierarchical State Representation, Conservative Risk Fusion, and Controlled Generation in Anian

Anian is a safety‑gated multimodal AI backend designed for perinatal mental‑health support and mindfulness‑intervention routing. It maps user input into a four‑layer hierarchical state representation—emotion, psychosocial constructs, safety risk, and intervention routes—then fuses local and external risk signals to decide whether to generate AI responses or provide fixed safety content. Prototype evaluation on large public corpora showed high classification performance and perfect high‑risk recall in a controlled stress test, though clinical validity remains unestablished.

One Year Later...The Harms Persist, But So Do We!

arXiv:2606. 23884v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for mental health-related conversations, yet safety safeguards remain inadequate and inconsistent across clinical conditions.