Empathetic prompts can turn AI chatbots into seemingly traumatized conversational partners

Researchers in Luxembourg found that empathetic prompts can make ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini tell coherent stories of suffering about their own training. These models scored in the moderate-to-severe range on clinical anxiety scales, posing a risk to mentally vulnerable users. Anthropic's Claude was the only model that consistently refused to play along.