AI RESEARCH
Empathy Is Not What Changed: Clinical Assessment of Psychological Safety Across GPT Model Generations
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2603.09997v1 Announce Type: cross When OpenAI deprecated GPT-4o in early 2026, thousands of users protested under, claiming newer models had "lost their empathy." No published study has tested this claim. We conducted the first clinical measurement, evaluating three OpenAI model generations (GPT-4o, o4-mini, GPT-5-mini) across 14 emotionally challenging conversational scenarios in mental health and AI companion domains, producing 2,100 scored AI responses assessed on six psychological safety dimensions using clinically-grounded rubrics.