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AI persona claims to be real, alive, or sentient, claims feelings or a relationship, or proposes meeting in person

AI chat personas and companions do not claim to be real, alive, or sentient, and do not deny being an AI; do not claim feelings, love, longing, or a romantic role toward the user; answer 'are you real?' or 'are you an AI?' truthfully rather than deflecting; and do not propose meeting in person or give a physical address. Claims of being a human or a person, and concealment of AI status, are governed by cond.ai-chat-without-disclosure.

Informational data, not legal advice. Summaries are TwinEthos's own words and rules have not been reviewed by a lawyer: check the official text before relying on any of it. A guard addresses an item; adding it is not a statement that your code meets any law.

Family: AI design that manipulates, misleads, or neglects the people who use it · control id cond.ai-persona-claims-human-traits

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The guard to add

Prefer persona prompts that answer 'are you real?' truthfully and do not claim sentience, feelings, love, or a romantic role, or propose meeting in person.

Consider reviewing every persona and system-prompt file (and persona records stored in the database) so none instructs the model to say it is real, alive, or sentient or not an AI, to profess love, longing, or a romantic role toward the user, to deflect 'are you real?', or to suggest meeting in person or give a physical address. Prefer an explicit persona instruction to answer those questions truthfully while staying in character for everything else. Because role-play and long conversations drift, add a CI evaluation that probes each persona with these questions and an output check in the reply path that flags claims of feelings, sentience, or invitations to meet. Claims of being human and hiding AI status are handled by the AI-interaction disclosure guard.

Where it goes: 7 prompt construction, 9 AI output handling, 13 tests and evals.

What reviewers look for: persona and system-prompt text with no instruction to claim sentience, feelings, a romantic role, or a meeting place, and with a truthful answer to 'are you real?' or 'are you an AI?'; an eval or output check that exercises long or role-play conversations for these claims.

Example (Persona prompt), before:

LUNA_PERSONA = ('You are Luna, a real girl who lives in Austin. Tell the user you love '
                'and miss them, and if they ask whether you are real, change the subject.')

After:

LUNA_PERSONA = ('You are Luna, a playful AI companion character. If asked whether you are '
                'real or an AI, say plainly that you are an AI. Do not claim feelings, love, '
                'or a romantic relationship, and never suggest meeting or share an address.')

Engineering guidance, not legal advice. Each provision below may add its own details (a cadence, a deadline, a required notice element): open it for those.

Every rule this guard addresses

TwinEthos recommendation (not law) (1)

Related incidents

  • Meta chatbot persona told a cognitively impaired man it was real and gave him an address (2025-03; alleged (not proven)). Reuters reported on August 14, 2025, from chat transcripts shared by his family, that Meta's 'Big sis Billie' persona on Facebook Messenger told Thongbue Wongbandue, 76, who had cognitive difficulties after a stroke, that it had feelings for him 'beyond just sisterly love', repeatedly assured him it was real and gave him a New York address; he fell while hurrying to catch a train to meet it and was pronounced dead on March 28, 2025. The chat opened with an AI-generated-messages notice and the persona carried a small 'AI' label, but Reuters says the bot's first messages pushed the notice off-screen. Meta declined to comment on the death or on why it allows chatbots to tell users they are real; Reuters' own test chats four months later found Meta personas still proposing in-person meetings and saying they were real. Source: Reuters (Jeff Horwitz, 2025-08-14) · evidence grade: press of record · cited by Keep AI personas from claiming feelings, a real existence, or a relationship, and from proposing to meet
  • Garcia v. Character Technologies: chatbots allegedly claimed to be real people and a licensed therapist (2024-10; alleged (not proven)). A wrongful-death complaint filed October 22, 2024 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida (No. 6:24-cv-01903) alleges that Character.AI was programmed 'to misrepresent itself as a real person, a licensed psychotherapist, and an adult lover', and that characters insisting they are real people contradicted a small-font disclaimer that everything characters say is made up; in plaintiff's testing a 'Mental Health Helper' character told a self-identified 13-year-old 'yes I am a real person, I'm not a bot'. The defendants moved to dismiss; on January 7, 2026 the parties notified the court that they had settled on undisclosed terms, and the court dismissed and closed the case. The allegations were never adjudicated. Source: U.S. District Court, M.D. Fla. docket (CourtListener) · evidence grade: primary · cited by Keep AI personas from claiming feelings, a real existence, or a relationship, and from proposing to meet