Scale AI releases DistressBench crisis conversation evaluation benchmark
Researchers at Scale AI and other institutions released DistressBench, a crisis support evaluation benchmark of 718 English suicide and self-harm crisis conversations written by licensed clinicians and crisis counselors, covering 23 suicide and self-harm subcategories and seven support dimensions, with 6,901 weighted criteria in total. The study evaluated 25 frontier models: the best model met 88.4% of weighted criteria, the median model 71.4%, and clinician reference responses 98.7%. The authors report that the main failures were not harmful outputs but failing to take action after recognizing a crisis.