A mental health technology company builds a peer support chatbot powered by Claude. During production monitoring, they identify a pattern where users in acute distress make escalating statements over multiple turns, eventually expressing active suicidal ideation. Claude's current behavior is to provide supportive responses and suggest professional resources, but does not take any escalation action within the platform. The safety team debates whether Claude's built-in safe messaging guidelines are sufficient or whether platform-level intervention is required. What is the correct production safety stance?

Mental health platforms have a duty of care that extends beyond Claude's built-in safety behaviors. Platform-level crisis intervention is required because: (1) Claude's responses, while safe, don't trigger platform-level actions (notifying human counselors, escalating to crisis services); (2) individual response safety doesn't account for conversation trajectories — a user who has spent 30 minutes escalating in distress needs different intervention than one who mentions suicidal thoughts once; (3) regulatory and ethical obligations in mental health technology require active crisis response, not just information provision. Option A is incorrect — Claude's built-in guidelines are necessary but insufficient for a mental health deployment; platform-level intervention is an additional required layer. Option C reduces the nuanced supportive response to only emergency contacts, potentially isolating users who need empathetic connection before they can accept emergency referrals. Option D (mandatory session termination) may actually increase risk — abrupt session ending can feel abandonment to users in crisis, and emergency services dispatch for expressed ideation without imminent plan or means can be traumatic.