CompanionSafe: From Multi-turn Safety Evaluation to Guardrails for AI Companions

Summary

CompanionSafe is a framework for evaluating and mitigating safety risks in AI companions, which provide ongoing emotional support through sustained relational interaction. Its evaluation component, CompanionEval, builds 1,300 relationally grounded multi-turn settings across four turn tiers from diverse personas, matched companion characters, and dialogue scenarios. Its mitigation component, CompanionGuard, turns benchmark-exposed failures into turn-localized supervision for companion-specific risk detection. The authors report that even strong LLMs and existing guard models remain vulnerable to companion-specific relational harms, and that safety risks increase as interactions grow longer.