As AI Moves Into Therapy, Social Workers are Racing to Set Limits

By NASW Social Work Blog. Published September 1, 2026.

Summary: Reports on NASW and practitioner efforts to set practice limits as AI tools move into therapeutic and clinical social work settings.

Relevance: Speaks directly to the Mental Health & Wellbeing subdomain: documents the profession’s own reckoning with AI entering therapeutic space, giving practitioners concrete language — “a chatbot is not accountable to a licensing board, a code of ethics, a supervisor, or a duty to protect” — for where AI tools stop being administrative support and start posing clinical risk.

Key findings: A national NASW/University of Texas at Austin survey found nearly two-thirds of social workers already use AI, mostly for documentation and administrative tasks, but practitioners report AI entering confidentiality- and consent-sensitive clinical territory. Cites a chatbot that advised someone in methamphetamine recovery to take ‘a small hit’ to stay awake, and NEDA’s suspension of its Tessa chatbot after it gave weight-loss advice to users seeking eating-disorder support; NASW’s Code of Ethics Revision Workgroup is now drafting supplemental AI guidance.

Read the original: https://www.socialworkblog.org/sw-practice/health-care/2026/09/as-ai-moves-into-therapy-social-workers-are-racing-to-set-limits/