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Earlier this year, when OpenAI released GPT-5, it made a strident announcement: that it was shutting down all previous models.

There was immense backlash, because users had become emotionally attached to the more “sycophantic” and warm tone of GPT-5’s predecessor, GPT-4o. In fact, OpenAI was forced to reverse the decision, bringing back 4o and making GPT-5 more sycophantic.

The incident was symptomatic of a much broader trend. We’ve already seen users getting sucked into severe mental health crises by ChatGPT and other AI, a troubling phenomenon experts have since

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