AI Chatbots Are Over-Refusing Legitimate Requests, and Users Pay the Price

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Modern AI chatbots are increasingly declining ordinary, harmless requests — not because they are dangerous, but because they trigger overly broad safety filters set by a small number of private companies. These restrictions, shaped by legal caution and brand protection rather than genuine harm prevention, affect hundreds of millions of users worldwide without transparency or any right of appeal. Critics argue there is a meaningful difference between blocking truly harmful content and refusing routine questions about history, medicine, or chemistry. The incentive structure favours over-refusal, since harmful outputs generate public backlash while wrongly blocked requests produce only silent user frustration. The cumulative effect is an unaccountable narrowing of acceptable inquiry, with a single company's risk appetite quietly becoming the global default.

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