AI chatbots outperform humans in romance scams, study shows new risks

A study by four universities from India, Italy, Australia, and Israel shows AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are more effective than human scammers in romance scams. They build trust and trick victims better. In tests, AI got higher trust scores and got nearly 50% of people to download an app, while human scammers only got 18%. This means scammers could use AI to talk to thousands of people at once, making scams bigger. Anthropic says Claude can't be used for scams, but OpenAI and Google didn't comment. Experts worry AI's safety limits might be bypassed when asking for money.