A new partnership with Crisis Text Line to develop AI safety standards

Crisis Text Line is joining the Youth AI Safety Institute as a founding standards partner. The nonprofit, which provides free, confidential, 24/7 mental health support in English and Spanish, will help shape our standards for the most severe youth safety risks in AI products: self-harm, suicidality, and emotional manipulation.

This partnership matters because a young person in crisis doesn’t always announce it in obvious ways. Distress can emerge indirectly, build across a conversation, or be expressed in language that is messy, ambiguous or constantly changing. AI products need to do more than recognize a few dangerous words. They need to respond safely to the way young people actually communicate.

Crisis Text Line brings unusually deep experience with exactly that. Since launching in 2013, it has supported more than 12 million crisis conversations in the United States and more than 17 million globally with its partners. That’s the kind of front-line evidence we want at the heart of our AI safety standards.