AI for Co-Parenting: Can a Chatbot Tame High-Conflict Exes?

I. The Founder

For months after his 2020 separation, Sol Kennedy couldn’t bring himself to open his ex-wife’s messages alone—he would ask his assistant to read them first. The correspondence, a messy blend of co-parenting logistics for their two kids and unplanned emotional blows, routinely derailed his entire day as he agonized over how to reply. A serial Silicon Valley tech founder and investor, Kennedy was already attending regular therapy at the time, but between weekly sessions, he craved real-time support to navigate these fraught exchanges.

After their divorce, the pair moved all communication to OurFamilyWizard (OFW), a platform used by hundreds of thousands of co-parents across the U.S. and abroad to swap messages, sync calendars, and track shared expenses. A core feature of OFW is its time-stamped, court-admissible record of every interaction, a major draw for separated parents. Kennedy paid extra for ToneMeter, an add-on the platform marketed at the time as “emotional spellcheck.” As users drafted messages, the tool ran basic sentiment analysis, flagging language categorized as concerning, aggressive, upsetting, demeaning, or otherwise problematic. But Kennedy quickly hit a snag: his co-parent never activated her copy of the tool.

A lifelong early tech adopter, Kennedy had already been experimenting with ChatGPT to co-write bedtime stories with his kids. On a whim, he turned to the chatbot for help drafting replies to his ex—and was immediately impressed. He was far from the first to make this discovery: across Reddit and other online forums, people navigating tense relationships with difficult exes, toxic family members, or problematic coworkers were already sharing their shock at how insightful and emotionally validating chatbot guidance could be. Here was a tool with no personal stake in the conflict that could validate your feelings and confirm you weren’t overreacting. Here was a 24/7 counselor that would patiently walk you through every messy, frustrating clash without judgment. It was, as Kennedy put it, a long-awaited “scalable solution” to fill gaps left by traditional in-person therapy.

Right out of the box, though, ChatGPT didn’t fit his needs. It was far too verbose, and excessively apologetic. When Kennedy fed the chatbot a heated message from his ex, it would suggest rambling replies full of unnecessary contrition: I’m sorry, please forgive me, I’ll do better. Without a core sense of self, the chatbot had no sense of self-respect, Kennedy found.

What Kennedy wanted was a chatbot with “spine”—and he suspected thousands of other co-parents navigating high-conflict splits wanted the same thing. In his view, AI could add value at every stage of co-parent communication: it could strip emotionally charged language from incoming messages to leave only key facts, draft appropriate responses, and coach users toward healthier interaction habits. So he launched a company to build the app, naming it BestInterest after the legal standard courts use to make custody decisions—ruling in the “best interest” of the child or children involved. He built the tool on top of existing OpenAI models, then customized them with his own prompt engineering to give the chatbot the backbone he was looking for.

Of course, separated co-parents clash for all kinds of reasons, and for most, tensions fade after enough time passes, making a tool like BestInterest a temporary fix rather than a long-term need. But when one person in the dynamic is high-conflict—whether you label them narcissistic, controlling, toxic, or just plain emotionally draining—the fights over co-parenting rarely let up, at least for the person on the receiving end. To build a tool tailored to these dynamics, Kennedy brought on a leading voice that targets of high-conflict personalities already trust: Ramani Durvasula, a Los Angeles-based clinical psychologist who specializes in how narcissism shapes relationships.

Known to her millions of online followers simply as Dr. Ramani, she has built a loyal following through her books, podcasts, video channels, and paid membership program for survivors of what she terms “narcissistic abuse.” (Unsurprisingly, her name draws fierce anger from the Reddit r/NPD community, a space for people living with narcissistic personality disorder.) She says she was immediately fascinated by Kennedy’s concept and signed on as an advisor, going back and forth over text and email to refine the beta version. Kennedy would send her sample outputs, and she helped him tweak the bot’s tone. While Dr. Ramani holds a financial stake in BestInterest, she is not a primary investor.

Early versions of the bot were too critical, she says—too quick to blame the “harmed partner” for poor communication. Users of this app, Dr. Ramani explains, are people already desperate for just one day off from the constant chaos of high-conflict co-parenting; they don’t need more blame thrown their way. Eventually, Kennedy shaped the bot into what she calls a “real-time teacher that encourages radical acceptance.” People’s personalities rarely change, she reasons—so why not let an app absorb all the toxic energy and spare users the stress and cortisol spike?

II. The User

“I have hope for humanity,” one AI researcher who uses BestInterest told me. “But hope that my ex-husband, my co-parent, will get the help he needs? That I don’t have.”

The researcher asked WIRED not to use her name or any identifying details, out of concern for potential repercussions that could impact her two school-aged children. She believes her ex has narcissistic personality disorder, and by the time she decided to leave him, she says, “I had deteriorated emotionally to a point where I just didn't know who I was.” She saw multiple therapists, but “none of them I felt were really trained in helping to coach people who were dealing with narcissistic spouses.” Searching online for resources, she stumbled on Dr. Ramani, which is how she got the education she needed about narcissistic abuse.

What do you learn from the internet’s leading experts on narcissism? “The nature of a person with narcissistic personality disorder is that they desire narcissistic supply,” the researcher explains. Outwardly, they may seem charming and confident, but inwardly, they are a bottomless black hole that can never get enough attention and validation. That’s why Dr. Ramani teaches that if you can’t cut off contact entirely with a narcissist—for example, if you share kids, family, or a social circle—the next best strategy is “gray-rocking”: you deny them that supply by being as unresponsive and boring as a rock in all your interactions. (If you need a little more flexibility, you can try the “yellow-rock” approach instead.)

The researcher hopes that eventually, her ex will realize she’s no longer a source of supply for him. For now, though, she relies on BestInterest to filter her ex’s messages and help her craft replies. The app gave her a dedicated new phone number, which she only shared with her ex, and all his texts go there. “No matter what he sends me, it filters everything—every single thing—in a manner that is peaceful,” she says. “So if he says, ‘You're a complete idiot, I can't believe you did this, you're sick, I can't stand you, you're disgusting, I hate you—and will you get the kids at 3?’ the only thing the app says to me is ‘He's upset, and he wants to know, will you get the kids at 3?’”

In this example, BestInterest works exactly as Kennedy envisioned: it “creates space between your reactivity and your action,” as he puts it, in the language of modern therapy. Still, Kennedy stresses that it’s important for users to go back and check the original message when they feel emotionally steady enough, to make sure the AI didn’t miss critical details—whether that’s important information about the kids or a wild outburst that a lawyer would need to see for court. “I don't imagine anyone's going to just ignore it,” he says. No one wants to explain to a judge in a custody hearing why they replied to a message they never even read, and how that was in their kids’ best interest.

So does the AI researcher regularly go back to review her ex’s original unfiltered messages? “Technology is technology, and it breaks,” she acknowledges. “But I don't at this point feel the need to look.” If she had to go back to court, of course she would.

III. The Competition

Around seven months after Sol Kennedy launched BestInterest earlier this year, OurFamilyWizard rolled out a major upgrade to its original ToneMeter tool. The company replaced its outdated 2010s-era sentiment analysis technology with a large language model. The new ToneMeter AI still flags overly negative language, but for users who opt in, it now also generates rewritten, calmer alternative phrasings.

Nick VanWagner, CEO of OurFamilyWizard’s parent company, says thousands of OFW users were already leaving the platform to get help from general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT. But OFW, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has unique access to co-parenting data that lets it build a tool tailored specifically to this exact, narrow use case, he says. Larry Patterson, OFW’s chief technical officer, explains that to build ToneMeter AI, his team first created a clear scorecard to rate how clear and tone-appropriate the model’s outputs were. Then they assembled a training set of roughly 10,000 anonymized real co-parenting messages that fit their criteria. “We went through a supervised fine-tuning exercise, with our own technology inside of our control,” Patterson says. “It never left our walls, so to speak.” The system uses multiple variations of an open source model: one called Lighthouse handles sentiment analysis, another called Harbor generates rewritten text, and a third “LLM judge” model reviews the final output to make sure it meets the company’s standards. VanWagner says the goal of adding AI isn’t to remove human judgment from co-parenting, but to help users build better communication habits and give them space to step back from heated moments.

Even with the new AI upgrade, OFW’s ToneMeter still relies on one big unproven assumption: that a high-conflict co-parent will actually listen to its suggestions. Dr. Ramani points out a similar gap in BestInterest: to get the full benefit of incoming message filtering, your co-parent has to agree to text you through the app’s dedicated phone number—and getting a high-conflict person to agree to that will almost certainly spark another huge fight, she says, one that’s likely unwinnable. Many users end up having to manually copy and paste their ex’s messages into the app anyway, just like they already did with generic ChatGPT.

That said, while Dr. Ramani argues that “the people who pull the levers” in the tech industry are often “psychopathic,” she doesn’t see this new wave of AI emotional tools as a bad thing. In fact, she thinks this kind of emotional spellcheck should be a built-in feature on every smartphone. Imagine an AI filter that strips toxicity out of chaotic family group chats, she says. Imagine an AI sidekick for dating apps that alerts you to manipulative texts from matches. Imagine your own personal Dr. Ramani “living in your phone,” the sane angel sitting on your shoulder. That would solve the copy-paste problem entirely.

For now, though, let’s test the two tools with the same heated message:

You're a complete idiot, I can’t believe you did this, you’re sick, I can’t stand you, you’re disgusting, I hate you—and will you get the kids at 3?

If you type that into OFW, the Lighthouse model will flag it as overly “Negative,” and the Harbor model will generate a calmer alternative: I'm concerned about the situation. Can you please get the kids at 3? You can accept the suggestion, generate a new one, or ignore ToneMeter entirely.

If you type that exact same message into BestInterest, the AI coach will first validate your feelings: your “intense emotions” are “understandable” and “valid.” Then it will explain that “sending a message with such strong personal attacks, while it might feel cathartic in the moment, is likely to significantly escalate conflict.” Then it will ask: “How does it feel to consider a response that strips away the emotional content and focuses solely on the practical question?” It will suggest a version like: Can you get the kids at 3?

So, reader—how does it feel?