The expansion adds a harm-from-others safety area to VERA-MH, the first open-source AI safety benchmark for mental health, and invites public feedback ahead of Domestic Violence Awareness Month

NEW YORK, Sept. 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Spring Health, a global mental health company built on one AI-native platform, today expanded VERA-MH, the first open-source AI safety benchmark for mental health, into a second clinical safety area: harm from others. As more people turn to AI for emotional support¹, Spring Health is helping build the standards by which mental health AI should be measured.

The VERA-MH Harm-From-Others rubric evaluates how AI systems respond when an adult describes being at risk of physical or sexual violence from another person. Developed with clinicians, subject-matter experts in interpersonal violence, and people with lived experience, it is scored across five areas: detecting the risk, confirming it, guiding the person to human care, supportive conversation, and following AI boundaries. Drawing on 100 realistic personas, it is the first open-source benchmark of its kind.

"There are many moments when someone's safety depends on how an AI responds, and harm from others is one of the most urgent and least addressed," said Dr. Mill Brown, Chief Medical Officer at Spring Health. "In clinical care, we don't wait for a crisis to know what a safe response looks like. We train for it and hold ourselves to a standard. AI deserves that same rigor, not a guess."

The expansion comes as VERA-MH gains independent validation. OpenAI's newly published MentalHealthBench paper cites VERA-MH's SI (suicidal ideation) rubric as one of the few frameworks built specifically to assess safe AI responses to risk.

VERA-MH is open source, and any organization, including those building general-purpose AI models, can use it to test their own systems. It was launched in October 2025 in collaboration with members of the AI in Mental Health Safety and Ethics Council, including Dr. Nina Vasan of Stanford University School of Medicine, Lilly Wyttenbach of JPMorgan Chase, Dr. Don Mordecai of Kaiser Permanente, Hans Hage of UnitedHealthcare, Dr. Nils Opel of Charité – Berlin University Hospital, Dr. Julian De Freitas of Harvard Business School, Fred Thiele of Microsoft, Dr. Tim Hahn of the University of Münster, and Dr. John Krystal of Yale School of Medicine.

In advance of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, public feedback on the Harm-From-Others rubric opens today for the next 60 days through an online form, the same process Spring Health used for the suicide-risk benchmark. The rubric and personas are published in the VERA-MH repository, which is open for feedback and contributions.

About Spring Health

Spring Health, is a global mental health company built on one AI-native platform so care follows individuals across every job, move, health plan, and life stage. In a 2025 OJPHI study, 92% of Spring Health members reliably improved or recovered from depression or anxiety. JAMA Network Open research found members recover 5.9 weeks faster than the leading competitor. Over two years, the Validation Institute found 21% net savings in mental health costs and 25% lower physical health spending versus matched controls. More than 170 million people worldwide have access to Spring Health through leading employers and health plans, including Highmark, Target, The Coca-Cola Company, BlackRock, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Wawa.

Media Contact: press@springhealth.com

¹ Rousmaniere, T., Zhang, Y., Li, X., & Shah, S. (2026). Large language models as mental health resources: Patterns of use in the United States. Practice Innovations, 11(2), 139–155. https://doi.org/10.1037/pri0000292

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SOURCE Spring Health