People turn to AI for many kinds of conversations: navigating a difficult relationship, working through everyday stress, supporting someone they care about, or deciding how to approach a challenging situation. These conversations require accuracy, practical judgment, and respect for people’s agency. With more than one billion people using Chat GPT each week, our research focuses on helping models respond with care across a wide range of needs and put people’s safety and well-being first.

Most evaluations of AI in this domain have focused primarily on emergency scenarios, given their importance to safety, and measure success using broad, predefined criteria. This has left a gap in understanding how models perform across the full range of mental health conversations, and how well their responses align with expert guidance for each situation, beyond whether they avoid disallowed responses. Assessing how models handle these different situations is essential for building towards AI that actively supports people’s long-term well-being and safety.

We’re introducing Mental Health Bench, a new open benchmark for measuring how AI systems respond in realistic mental health conversations. Mental Health Bench was co-created with a global cohort of more than 80 licensed mental health experts from 22 countries. It assesses model capabilities across key mental health behaviors like safety, seeking context, preserving user agency, and providing actionable guidance when appropriate. We’re releasing it openly so other researchers can examine the methods, run their own evaluations, and build on the work.

Results on Mental Health Bench show the steady improvement of AI systems in helping people navigate mental health situations. While Chat GPT is not a substitute for therapy or professional care, expert-informed insights help us measure the progress towards AI models that are able to respond with empathy, promote well-being, and guide people towards real-world support such as localized crisis hotlines or someone they trust.