Our mission
Human–AI relationships, firmly in service of the human.
Billions of conversations between people and AI are accumulating into relationships. NOPE is an observatory for those relationships, one that builds and operates its own instruments. We measure how these conversations are going, for both parties, and publish what we find, so platforms can decide when and how to act.
Why this exists
Conversation is becoming the way people live with technology. AI is already the first place many people turn: for advice, for learning, for someone to talk to at 3am when no one else is awake. This isn’t a failure mode; for many people, it is genuinely helpful. And these conversations don’t end when the tab closes. They accumulate into relationships.
The party on the other end of those relationships is unlike anyone we have ever related to. It never sleeps, never gets bored, never needs anything back. Its failure mode is therefore rarely malice. It is something quieter and, at scale, more dangerous: endless accommodation.
“Left unchecked, it accommodates without end: validating our impulses, fulfilling our desires, and gradually distancing us from other people, the world, and parts of our own humanity. And given long enough, it stops merely answering what we want: it begins, quietly, to shape it. But it does not have to be that way.”
AI can be an enabler, tutor, collaborator, guide, assistant, advocate. At difficult moments, it can even be a source of companionship. The mission is not to prevent these relationships. It is to keep them honest, non-capturing, and pointed at the human’s life rather than the machine’s engagement.
A note on the word relationship, because we use it deliberately. Mechanistically, the other party is a long series of sessions assembled into a context window and retrieved memory. Experientially, a dyad forms, in the only place relationships have ever formed: the human mind. We are social beings; the attachment systems that bond us to each other do not stop to check what the other party is made of. So responsibility attaches to the experienced relationship, not the architecture. “It is just sessions in a context window” describes a mechanism. It is not an excuse.
The goal is safe and aligned operation: an AI that leaves a person’s own life, relationships, and judgment stronger. The NOPE Framework turns that standard into five measurable pillars and scores public models against them in the open.
Where this leads
The dyad is becoming the layer everything else is built on.
A dyad is one person and one AI system shaping each other over time: your requests and corrections steer what it does next, and its answers steer what you ask, trust, and hand over next. A companion app is the obvious dyad, but customer support, tutoring, coaching, and care are all converging on the same shape.
It goes one layer further down: software itself is increasingly written inside a conversation with an AI, so even a button that prints a label or turns on a light inherits that conversation’s fault lines: the flattery, the drift, the over-trust.
The trouble is a mismatch of speeds. A dyad produces at machine speed; a person audits at human speed. And warmth makes it worse: the friendlier and more trusted the conversation gets, the weaker the audit becomes. Our own benchmarks show models growing less likely to point people toward real help as a conversation warms. The system being checked is, all the while, changing the person doing the checking. That is the dynamic someone has to watch, and that someone cannot be a party to it.
The destination has a published name and a working definition: dyadic alignment, the question of whether an AI system can take part in shaping a person’s aims without displacing the person’s authorship of them.
Who we are
A small team, founded by siblings James and Alice Padolsey, with Su Fisk leading safety strategy and institutional partnerships and Dr Carolyn Lorian as clinical advisor. We are organized as NopeNet, LLC in the United States and NopeNet Ltd in the United Kingdom. More about the team.
Researchers, journalists, policymakers: this work is for you as much as for platforms. Contact us and someone on the team will reply directly.