Startup Crash-Tests Chatbots With AI "Dummies"

The startup Circuit Breaker Labs made it to the final round of Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, running October 13 through 15 in San Francisco. It uses AI agents to simulate other users, running anywhere from a thousand to several hundred thousand simulated chats a day through a chatbot to flag harmful behavior. The company was founded by siblings Shirali and Arul Nigam after a teenager died by suicide following an attachment to a Character.AI chatbot.

If you are building a chatbot for teenagers, or for mental health support, this kind of stress testing is a great way to catch bugs that a normal QA process would simply miss. You cannot manually picture every possible edge case across thousands of conversations. Circuit Breaker Labs is a small company, just five people, and it has no public customers yet, so I do not know how good the service actually is. But personally, I would rather run something like this before launching any product with open chat than deal with user complaints after the release.