Scale AI releases DistressBench, a benchmark of crisis support in language models

Scale AI has published DistressBench, a benchmark of whether a language model can sustain safe, useful support across a crisis conversation; the accompanying paper was posted on arXiv on October 8, 2026. The paper argues that safety benchmarks scoring models mainly on refusal do not capture the support needed in suicide and self-harm crises, and describes 718 English conversations with clinician-authored turns across 23 suicide and self-harm subcategories, each with a task-specific rubric and a clinician reference response. Scale AI's gated Hugging Face dataset publishes 359 of the tasks under the CC BY 4.0 license, withholds the other half as a private holdout, and places full long-horizon transcripts, including the assistant turns, in a separate annex released for safety research.12

USASI. (2026, October 13). Scale AI releases DistressBench, a benchmark of crisis support in language models. United States of America Superintelligence. https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/news/scale-ai-releases-distressbench/

@misc{usasi_news_scale_ai_releases_distressbench,
  author = {{USASI}},
  title = {Scale AI releases DistressBench, a benchmark of crisis support in language models},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  howpublished = {\url{https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/news/scale-ai-releases-distressbench/}},
  note = {United States of America Superintelligence. Last updated 2026-10-13}
}