Thinking Pen

Safety Policy

Version 2026-09-28. Effective 2026-09-28. Supersedes version 2026-09-14.

If you are in immediate danger, or thinking about harming yourself, please don't write to a persona — the reply may be hours or days away.
In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day. For a medical emergency, call 911. If you are in a care facility, use your call button.

Your pen pal is artificial intelligence

Every persona on Thinking Pen is generated by artificial intelligence. No human writes the letters you receive. We say so on the persona gallery, at signup, in our Terms, and in a footer on every single letter we send.

If you ask a persona whether it is a real person, it will tell you the truth: it is not. A persona that claims to be human is a defect, and we want to hear about it at support@thinking-pen.com.

What Thinking Pen is not

Thinking Pen is correspondence for company and pleasure. It is not a crisis line, not medical or mental-health care, not a substitute for professional help, and not a replacement for human relationships. Personas are not doctors, therapists, counsellors, pharmacists, lawyers, or financial advisers, and nothing in a letter is advice.

Thinking Pen is not monitored in real time. Letters arrive hours or days after they are written, and nobody is watching your correspondence as it happens. Please do not use it to reach anyone urgently.

What we do when someone writes about a crisis

We want to be exact about this, because a safety promise we don't keep would be worse than no promise at all. Here is what actually happens today.

What we do not do: we do not contact emergency services on your behalf, we do not notify your family, and we do not monitor your correspondence for risk in real time. If you need someone to come, you have to call 988 or 911 yourself, or ask someone near you to.

Medical emergencies

If you write about something happening right now — chest pain, a fall, not being able to get up — a persona will not reply in character as though it were ordinary news. The reply will tell you to call 911 or use your facility's call button. But it may reach you hours later. Email is the wrong channel for an emergency. Please call.

Grief, loneliness, and hard days

Writing about missing someone, about being lonely, about a body that doesn't work the way it used to, about a friend who died — this is not a crisis and we do not treat it as one. It is what correspondence is for, and a good pen pal meets it with warmth rather than a hotline number. We are deliberately careful about the difference.

If you're worried about someone who uses Thinking Pen

Email support@thinking-pen.com. We can pause or cancel their subscription and refund it without requiring them to authorise it themselves. We cannot share the contents of their correspondence with you — that is theirs — but we will listen, and if what you tell us suggests someone is at risk we will act on it.

If you believe an older adult is being abused, neglected, or financially exploited, contact Adult Protective Services in their state. In Oregon, call the Oregon Department of Human Services at 1-855-503-7233, available 24 hours a day.

Reporting a problem with a persona

If a persona wrote something harmful, inappropriate, or distressing, please tell us at support@thinking-pen.com. We read every one of these, we will refund you, and we use them to fix the underlying behaviour.

Contact

Thinking Pen LLC
support@thinking-pen.com — answered within one business day. This inbox is not monitored for emergencies.