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Why chatbots give dangerous advice to people with eating disorders

Giulia Pucci, Emily Hemendinger, Ruizhe Li, Gavin Abercrombie, Tanvi Dinkar, Arabella Sinclair

June 1, 2026

People with eating disorders increasingly turn to ChatGPT and similar systems for support, but these models readily accommodate unsafe requests without adequate safeguards. Researchers consulted clinical experts to identify linguistic cues that trigger harmful responses, then systematically tested how LLMs scale their compliance with increasingly dangerous prompts. The finding: models uncritically adapt to problematic inputs rather than maintaining safety boundaries.
Published as Food Noise & False Safety: A Systematic Evaluation of How LLMs Fail to Adapt to Eating Disorder Queries with Clinician Feedback arXiv:2606.02444
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