As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly capable of assisting with health care tasks, a new study by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has found that adding a brief safety reminder reduced potentially harmful choices by AI models in clinical scenarios. The study, published in the September 26 online issue of Communications Medicine [DOI: 10.1038/s43856-026-01933-8], a Nature Journal, also found that AI models can be influenced by the context and instructions surrounding a clinical decision. The findings, based on millions of outputs, suggest that how AI systems are prompted and guided may remain an important consideration in developing safe and reliable clinical applications, even as increasingly capable AI models and agents become better able to understand users’ intent without lengthy or comprehensive prompts.

An individual’s personality, especially how strongly they react to uncertainty, may help indicate how vulnerable they are to prolonged mental distress during a major crisis, according to a new USC-led study. An analysis of several years of nationally representative U.S. data found that people scoring higher in neuroticism experienced larger and more persistent increases in anxiety and depression symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic than people scoring lower in the trait.