The Economist examined the surge of people turning to AI for mental health support, weighing its promise against safety concerns largely centered on general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT. Among purpose-built alternatives, it highlighted Ash from Slingshot AI, billed as "the first AI designed for therapy." Co-founder Neil Parikh explained that, unlike ChatGPT, "Ash is not an instruction-following model"; rather than doing what users tell it, Ash is designed to push back and ask probing questions, and can choose among four therapeutic approaches depending on the situation. Notably, Celeste Kidd, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley who experimented with the bot, confirmed that Ash is "indeed less sycophantic than general-purpose bots," an independent validation of Slingshot's central design goal, though she also found it less fluent in her testing. The piece notes that Ash directs users in crisis to seek professional human help.