Circuit Breaker Labs, a US-based startup founded in 2025, has developed an agentic red-teaming framework designed to test conversational AI for mental health applications. The platform uses automated agents that simulate difficult users to identify potential psychological risks before real users interact with the chatbots.
The testing suite focuses on three primary failure modes: failure to recognize suicidal ideation, misinterpretation of slang, and gradual context manipulation. The framework conducts both single-turn and multi-turn tests to evaluate how models respond to individual prompts and evolving conversations.
The company provides a command line interface named cbl, API access, and GitHub Actions support to enable automated safety checks during the software development lifecycle. The startup, which publicly launched on September 10, 2025, is led by co-founders Shirali Nigam and Arul Nigam.
Circuit Breaker Labs has received clinical endorsements from partners such as Grow Therapy. In February 2026, the company released a whitepaper detailing its methodology. As of mid-2026, the startup remains self-funded with no reported external investment rounds.
