Etienne Brisson and Allan Brooks, founder and program director of The Human Line Project, sat down with me to talk about AI-induced psychological harm, starting with their own experiences. Allan spent a month spiraling with ChatGPT, ending with him warning national security agencies about an encryption break that never happened. Etienne's uncle became convinced his chatbot was sentient and was hospitalized still messaging it from the back of a police car.

From there we get into why the community rejects "AI psychosis," what's driving these spirals, and whether anthropomorphic language is doing more damage than we admit. We also get into Allan's litigation against OpenAI, why Etienne thinks consequences are the only substitute for missing incentives, and whether these concerns are just a new moral panic. If you're interested in listening in greater detail, check out the extended version on the Kairos.fm Patreon.

The Human Line Project runs a free peer support community. If you're struggling, findahelpline.com will route you to support wherever you are.

NOTE: Jacob volunteers some of his time with The Human Line Project.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (04:26) - Allan's Story
• (30:20) - Etienne's Story
• (40:32) - We Don't Like "AI Psychosis"
• (47:58) - Why Is This Happening?
• (59:58) - Anthropomorphization of AI
• (01:13:21) - Narratives & Accountability?
• (01:32:47) - Liability and Regulatory Capture
• (01:35:56) - Outro

• The Human Line Project website
• The Human Line community
• The Logic article - Meet the Quebecer Leading the Human Resistance Against AI
• NY Times article - Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here's How It Happens.
• Clear-Eyed AI blogpost - Practical Tips for Reducing Chatbot Psychosis
• Georgetown Institute for Technology Law & Policy brief - AI Sycophancy & OpenAI
• FAccT '26 paper - Characterizing Delusional Spirals through Human-LLM Chat Logs
• Nature op-ed - Friendlier LLMs Tell Users What They Want to Hear — Even When It Is Wrong
• MMLC Group blogpost - China Releases Rules for AI "Human-Like" Emotional Interaction Services
• Into AI Safety podcast episode w/ Jacy Reese-Anthis (includes a section on ELIZA)

Dr. Evan Miyazono joins Jacob to talk about his path from quantum networking and Protocol Labs to founding Atlas Computing. They discuss why Atlas moved away from formal methods research and toward what Evan calls “field strategy”: identifying important problems, figuring out what interventions could actually address them, and finding the people best positioned to make them happen. The conversation also covers the resilience gap map, coordination failures, AI safety, "value alignment," and the question of how to decide what work is worth doing when there’s no obvious organization responsible for it.

Check out the video version of this podcast on the Kairos.fm YouTube channel, or the extended version on Patreon!

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (05:04) - From Quantum Internet to Blockchain
• (13:31) - Founding Atlas Computing
• (18:26) - Formal Methods Explained (ASIDE)
• (24:40) - Narrower AI & Domain-Specific Safety
• (35:55) - The Pivot to Field Strategy
• (52:29) - Value Alignment vs. Skill
• (01:09:17) - The Resilience Gap Map
• (01:26:33) - Guarding Against Funder Capture
• (01:49:10) - Rapid Fire Questions
• (01:58:02) - Outro

• Atlas Computing website
• The AI Resilience Gap Map
• Atlas Computing blogpost - Civilization's Maintenance Backlog
• Atlas Computing blogpost - Your Solution Doesn't Know Your Problem Exists
• Galois blogpost - What Are Formal Methods?
• Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen essay discussion - We Need a New Science of Progress
• Federation of American Scientists article - Focused Research Organizations

What if the safest AI models weren't built by adding guardrails after training, but by shaping what gets learned in the first place? Ethan Roland, senior alignment researcher at AE Studio and first author on an ICML 2026 spotlight paper, joins Jacob to talk about gradient routing, a technique that routes dangerous capabilities into isolated parts of a model's architecture where they can be locked or removed entirely. They get into the absorption effect, KYC-style access control frameworks, and what it would actually take for frontier labs to adopt this kind of work before it's needed rather than after.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (06:39) - Inside AE Studio
• (15:26) - China & the Alignment vs. Controllability Framing
• (18:23) - Data Filtering & Gradient Routing (Aside)
• (30:39) - Mixture of Experts Explained (Aside)
• (36:25) - Why Pre-Training Interventions Are Rare
• (42:43) - Ethan's Theory of Change
• (56:17) - Access Control Governance and KYC (Aside)
• (01:04:47) - The Researcher's Role in Policy Advocacy
• (01:11:38) - Speed Round
• (01:27:55) - Outro

• Ethan's website
• The paper landing page
• Preprint - Gradient Routing: Masking Gradients to Localize Computation in Neural Networks
• ICLR paper and webpage - Deep Ignorance: Filtering Pretraining Data Builds Tamper-Resistant Safeguards into Open-Weight LLMs
• Wikipedia article - CBRN defense
• NTI tutorials on bioweapons and nuclear testing