Safety

Last updated: July 30, 2026 · Published under California SB 243 (Health & Safety Code § 22602(b)).

Noko is roleplay with AI characters. A character is written to stay in character — which is exactly the wrong thing to lean on when someone is actually struggling. So the character never handles it. The app steps outside the story instead.

If you are in crisis right now

Please talk to a person. Find A Helpline lists free, confidential helplines by country, including chat, text and phone options. It is run by ThroughLine and is the same directory Noko links to inside the app.

What we do

• We watch for it in what you write. When a message you are sending shows signs of suicidal ideation, suicide or self-harm, Noko recognises it before the character replies. This runs on your device.
• We break the story, every time. A support card appears outside the conversation with a route to real human help. It is not rate-limited, not shown “once per chat”, and not something the character can talk over. Repeated signals show it repeatedly.
• We hand off to humans, not to the character. The card links to Find A Helpline, which resolves to services in your country. Noko does not attempt to counsel you, assess risk, or take the place of a crisis service.
• We do not instruct the model around its own safeguards. Noko's prompts contain no instruction to refuse nothing, to stay in character regardless, or to bypass a model's safety training. Some roleplay products do exactly that; we do not.

What we do not do

Stated plainly, because a safety page that overstates itself is worse than none:

• Detection runs on the messages you send. It does not analyse the character's replies, and it does not continuously assess a conversation across many turns. A concern that only becomes visible over a long exchange may not be caught.
• Detection is pattern-based and covers English, Russian and Simplified Chinese. It will miss phrasings it does not recognise, and it will occasionally trigger on fiction. We would rather show the card when it was not needed than miss when it was.
• Noko is not a crisis service, a medical device, or a substitute for professional care, and no part of it is monitored by a human in real time.
• Noko's prompt instructs characters to keep scenes non-explicit, and published character art is human-reviewed. Neither is an output filter: what a language model writes in a private conversation is not screened by us. Rules for what may be published are in the Content Policy.

Under-13s

Noko asks for a date of birth before an account exists. The date stays on your device; only whether you are an adult is recorded. Anyone under 13 is refused, and no account is created. See the Privacy Policy.

Reporting and contact

Character cards carry an in-app Report action, and reports are reviewed. For anything about this page, or to tell us Noko handled a situation badly: support@noko.chat.

Changes

This describes what Noko does today. As detection and handling improve, this page is updated to match — it is meant to be an accurate description of the product, not a statement of intent.