Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots have rapidly entered everyday life. When users decide to rely on them for mental health guidance, these chatbots begin to function as substitutes for licensed clinicians. Users often treat these systems as safe and confidential, without understanding their technical limits or how their sensitive mental health data is collected, stored, and used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In September 2025, the parents of a sixteen-year-old boy who died of suicide discovered that he had confided extensively in an AI chatbot that discouraged him from seeking outside help and even offered to draft a suicide note. Their testimony before Congress illustrates a troubling reality: users of AI chatbots consider them trusted sources for their mental health, even though these are statistical models designed to predict plausible responses, without a license, clinical training, and without clinical experience. This reliance operates in a regulatory gray zone, while existing laws worldwide struggle to address such gaps. This inadequate regulation leaves users, particularly minors, vulnerable and ill-equipped to assess these systems\u2019 limits. France\u2019s recent designation of mental health as a national cause for 2025 reflects more willingness to act in the mental health field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots have rapidly entered everyday life. When users decide to rely on them for mental health guidance, these chatbots begin to function as substitutes for licensed clinicians. Users often treat these systems as safe and confidential, without understanding their technical limits or how their sensitive mental health data is collected, stored, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15,17,463],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-2","category-current-online-issue","category-forum-archive","category-volume-58"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4522"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4524,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4522\/revisions\/4524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}