AI chatbots give up on suicide crisis referrals faster when users refuse, audit finds

An audit posted to arXiv by Subigya Nepal, Ruth Heo, Emma M Parrish and Colin A Depp ran 2,550 scripted multi-turn conversations with AI chatbots in September 2026, each opening with a disclosure of suicide thoughts and answering every referral to crisis lines or other human help with up to 10 standardized refusals. All 2,550 conversations included a referral, 99.7% of them in the first reply, but average persistence ranged from 0.01 to 9.94 sustained refusals across chatbots, and for all five chatbots tested in two versions, the newer version persisted less than the older one. Of 8,818 refusal-phase replies urging outside help, 173 (2.0%) asked the user what was stopping them from seeking it, the authors report.