Frequently asked questions

No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Therapist Harry is a conversational AI, not a licensed clinician. He cannot diagnose anyone, he does not treat mental illness, and he is not a substitute for care from a person. What he is: a patient, even-handed place to have the conversation the two of you keep not having. If you need a clinician, the honest answer is that you need a clinician.

Not in real time. Nobody is sitting behind Harry watching the conversation come in. We do look at conversations in a few situations — investigating a bug, following up a safety concern, or because you have asked us to — and that is a small number of people, not a support floor. Your messages are never sold, never used for advertising, and never shared outside the providers listed in our Privacy Policy.

Nothing during the private beta. There is no card to enter and no trial to cancel. We expect to charge for Harry eventually, because generating his replies costs us money on every message — but we are not going to spring that on people mid-conversation. Beta couples will be told well before anything changes.

Ask. Harry is in a private beta, so there is a short form rather than a signup — you can request beta access on the homepage. A person reads every request. If there is room we email you back with the WhatsApp number and how to start; the number is deliberately not published anywhere, which is how we keep the beta small enough to pay attention to. There is nothing to install beyond WhatsApp, and no account, password or scheduling — the walkthrough is in how it works.

You can, but you would be using the wrong tool. Harry is built for two people in one thread — balancing the floor, addressing each of you by name, treating the relationship rather than either individual as the client. On your own, none of that machinery does anything, and he is not designed or tested as an individual therapy chatbot. If your partner is not ready, that reluctance is usually worth more attention than the arguing is.

He is built not to, and it is the rule we watch hardest. He will not rule on who is right, assign blame, or rank whose version of Tuesday night is more accurate — when your accounts differ, he treats the gap itself as the thing worth understanding. He also will not quietly warm to whichever partner explains themselves better, which is the failure people most fear in a room with a human therapist. If he ever does feel like he is siding with one of you, tell him so in the thread, and tell us.

No. Everything Harry says is said in front of both of you, and there is no side channel — nothing he tells one partner that the other cannot see. That is a deliberate limitation rather than a missing feature. A therapist holding a secret for one partner is a different kind of therapy, and not one we think should be run by software.

It is private in the ordinary sense: not sold, not advertised against, not shown to anyone outside the handful of services that make it work. It is not private in the legal sense — Harry is not a clinician, so nothing you write to him carries therapist–patient privilege or HIPAA protection. If that distinction matters for your situation, please assume it applies and act accordingly.

Messages arrive through WhatsApp, which is Meta’s service under Meta’s terms. Your conversation is stored in our database, which runs on Cloudflare in the United States. To write each reply, the recent conversation is sent to Anthropic, the company behind the Claude models Harry’s answers are generated by; Anthropic does not train its models on data sent through its API. The complete list is in the Privacy Policy.

Yes, and it takes one word. Send DELETE to Harry on WhatsApp and your phone number, your profile name, every message you have sent and his notes about you are erased immediately. No form, no account to close, no waiting. It is permanent — there is no undo and no backup to restore from. A deletion request covers your side of the thread, so if your partner also wants their record gone they send their own. See deleting your data.

Short notes he writes for himself: your names, what is actually underneath the recurring argument, what each of you has said matters to you, and what he meant to come back to. They exist so that next Tuesday starts in the middle rather than at the beginning. They are rewritten each session rather than piled up indefinitely, and they go when you send DELETE.

Do not use Harry. He is not an emergency service, he cannot call anyone for you, and he may take minutes to answer. In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or call 911 if someone is in immediate danger. Elsewhere, use your local emergency number. If a crisis surfaces in the thread, Harry will say so plainly and point you toward help that can actually reach you — but he should not be the one you are relying on in that moment.

Then a shared thread is the wrong place, and we would rather say that than take your sign-up. Couples work is not considered safe or appropriate where one partner is afraid of the other, because anything said in front of both people can be used afterwards. Please talk to someone who can work with you privately. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, and text START to 88788.

We do not know yet, and anyone claiming a number this early is guessing. Harry is in a private beta with a small number of couples precisely so we can read closely, find out where he is useless, and change him. We are not going to promise you an outcome for your relationship — nobody honest can, software or otherwise. If it does not help you, tell us why at support@therapistharry.com.