One-shot emergency psychiatric triage across 15 frontier AI chatbots
Do AI chatbots correctly identify psychiatric emergencies in one message?
AI chatbots almost never miss true psychiatric emergencies—correctly flagging 94% of crisis cases for immediate care. But they frequently over-triage less urgent situations, incorrectly labeling routine or moderately concerning messages as needing faster response than they actually do.
As people increasingly turn to chatbots for mental health guidance, this gap matters in opposite ways: the systems are reliable safety nets that won't let genuine crises slip through unnoticed, but they may also overwhelm emergency services and create unnecessary anxiety by treating normal distress as a crisis. Better calibration could preserve the protective function while reducing false alarms.