Safety and crisis protocol

If you are thinking about suicide or self-harm, please talk to a person now. These lines are free and confidential.

If you are in danger now, call your local emergency number (911 in the US and Canada, 999 or 112 in the UK, 112 in the EU).

Our crisis protocol

Nuku is a "companion chatbot" under California SB 243 and New York General Business Law Article 47. This is the protocol those laws ask us to publish, and the one we hold ourselves to everywhere.

1. We check every chat message in two independent ways: a list of phrases that suggest suicide, self-harm, abuse or a medical emergency, checked before any AI sees the message, and the AI model itself, which is instructed to flag these instead of answering.
2. Nuku steps out of the game. When either check fires, the pet stops playing. It says plainly that it is an AI and can't keep you safe, and shows the crisis line for where you are (picked from your device's time zone), plus your local emergency number. The game puts this panel over everything else.
3. That reply is fixed text, written and reviewed by people, not generated by the AI. It follows the safe messaging guidelines: no discussion of methods, no presenting suicide as a solution, no game language.
4. Nuku never roleplays through it. Even when Nuku is "asleep" after a long chat, a message like this still gets the hand-off.
5. We count, we don't read. We keep a monthly count of hand-offs (no message content, no identity) so we can report it as California requires from July 2027. The message that triggered it is not stored in Nuku's memory.
6. Your guardians are not told about chats. The automatic alert is only for going quiet. Telling someone about a hard night is your choice.

AI disclosure

• Nuku is an AI, not a person. It says so at the start of every chat and again every three hours of continued chat.
• Chats are answered by an AI model (Claude, made by Anthropic, running on Amazon Bedrock). The game asks before your first chat.
• Nuku never claims to be human, a therapist, a doctor or a counsellor, and has no romantic or sexual roleplay.

Built against dependence

• A visit takes thirty seconds. There are no streaks to protect and nothing is lost by missing days.
• After about thirty messages in a day, Nuku gets sleepy, says goodnight and suggests something offline.
• Nuku regularly asks about the people in your life and encourages you to reach out to them.
• Notifications: at most one gentle nudge per quiet spell, never guilt ("Nuku misses you, tap to say hi").

Adults only

Nuku is for people 18 and over. The game asks before a pet is created.

The guardian alert is not an emergency service

When you go quiet for the time you chose, the people you picked get one notification. Nobody is dispatched, no location is shared, and notifications can be delayed or lost (a phone that's off, a browser that blocks them). Please don't rely on Nuku as your only safety plan.

Kindness lanterns: strangers, but nothing unkind

Once a day you can fold a paper lantern for a stranger, and on a later visit Nuku brings one back from someone else. Lanterns are built only from fixed word lists ("It's okay to... rest", "Someone out there is... rooting for you"). There is no free text, so nobody can send insults, links, phone numbers, scams or personal details, and no lantern says who wrote it. There are no replies, profiles or counts; the only response is a wordless "warm glow" back.

• Report takes a lantern away for you at once. Two reports take it out for everyone; three reports against one writer take all of their lanterns out.
• One lantern per pet per day, and a limit per network, so nobody can flood the sky.
• Some lanterns are written by the Nuku team while we're small, so that early players still find one. The game marks them: "Written by the Nuku team."

Guardians see a glow, not your activity

After a guardian accepts, their page shows your Nuku's glow: lit if you checked in within the last day, softly dimmed if not. That is all they see: no times, no actions, no chats. You can also choose (it's off unless you turn it on) to send a guardian a calm "All is well" notification on evenings you've checked in.

How we check that the alert works

• Every hour, a test pet goes quiet on purpose. Our canary hatches a test Nuku with a one-minute window and lets its nudge and guardian alert go out to a real push subscription that only the canary owns, then checks that both actually arrived. If any step fails, the team is told and fixing it comes first.
• Test it yourself. "Test my alert" in Settings sends your guardians a notification clearly marked as a test, and a guardian can send themself a test from their page. Settings shows how many of your guardians can receive an alert right now, and Nuku tells you if a guardian's browser stops accepting notifications.
• After a real alert, a guardian can tap "I'm checking on them" or "They're OK". You'll see that someone checked on you next time you open Nuku. If nobody answers within 6 hours and you still haven't visited, each guardian gets one gentle reminder, and then nothing more.

Report a problem

If Nuku said something it shouldn't have, or missed a moment it should have caught, write to support@jestr.ai. A person reads every report, and we re-test the crisis flow after every change to the AI model.