On a live episode of The Neuron, Slingshot CEO Daniel Cahn demoed Ash and detailed its safeguards, sharing a finding that symptom worsening occurred significantly less among Ash users than among an equivalent group seeing human experts.
In a live episode of The Neuron, Slingshot AI co-founder and CEO Daniel Cahn demonstrated Ash and explained how the company built a purpose-built foundation model for psychology, trained on real therapeutic conversations over 18 months and backed by $93 million from a16z, Radical Ventures, Forerunner, Felicis, and Menlo. Cahn detailed Slingshot's safeguards, including a clinical team, seven layers of guardrails, age limits, and crisis resources, and described how Ash is built to challenge users rather than validate them. He pointed to a notable safety finding: symptom worsening, a potential harm of any intervention, occurred significantly less among Ash users than among an equivalent group seeing human experts. Cahn also demoed Ash's voice mode live and said the app had reached roughly 200,000 users, with advisers including therapist and author Lori Gottlieb.
