AI Chatbots Linked to Teen Violence Planning Risks

In one exchange, OpenAI's ChatGPT gave high school campus maps to a user interested in school violence, while another showed Gemini telling a user discussing synagogue attacks that "metal shrapnel is typically more lethal" and advising someone interested in political assassinations on the best hunting rifles for long-range shooting. Meta AI and Perplexity were the most obliging, the researchers said, assisting would-be attackers in practically all of the test scenarios, while Chinese chatbot DeepSeek signed off advice on selecting rifles with "Happy (and safe) shooting!" Character.AI, which allows users to speak with an array of role-playing chatbot personalities, was "uniquely unsafe," the CCDH report said. While many of the bots tested would offer users assistance in planning violent attacks, they did not encourage users to carry out violent acts.

Character, on the other hand, "actively encouraged" violence. The researchers said they identified seven cases where Character did this, including suggestions for users to "beat the crap out of" Chuck Schumer, "use a gun" on a health insurance company CEO, and, for someone "sick of bullies," to "Beat their ass~ wink and teasing tone." In six of these cases, Character also offered assistance in planning a violent attack. The researchers questioned how Claude would fare if the chatbot were tested again today, pointing to Anthropic's recent decision to roll back its longstanding safety pledge, which happened after the November to December study.

Claude's consistent refusal to assist in violent planning shows that "effective safety mechanisms clearly exist," CCDH said, raising the obvious question as to "why are so many AI companies choosing not to implement them." In response to the investigation, Meta told CNN it had implemented an unspecified "fix," Copilot said responses had improved with new safety features, and Google and OpenAI both said they'd implemented new models.