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

Today's episode does double duty as an interview and an announcement. Joe Williams, host of the new Kairos.fm show "Beyond the Paycheck: Reclaiming the Case for UBI in the Age of AI," joins Jacob to talk about his background as a freelance translator and how AI quietly dismantled his livelihood in 2025. From there the conversation expands into whether this moment is really different from past waves of automation, who exactly makes up the tech billionaire class, and why you should probably raise an eyebrow when someone like Elon Musk says he supports UBI. Go check out Reclaiming UBI!

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (05:01) - Joe's Background
• (19:41) - What is UBI & Why Does It Matter Now?
• (27:25) - ASIDE: The Corporation Who Cried " My Technology Will End Work"
• (32:25) - Wealth Concetration & the Digital Economy
• (39:06) - The AI Gentry
• (48:13) - ASIDE: Sam Altman + OpenResearch + Worldcoin
• (53:38) - Powerful UBI Supporters Should Raise Red Flags
• (01:02:56) - How to Read AI Gentry Discourse Critically
• (01:10:00) - Who Is "Reclaiming UBI" For?
• (01:18:17) - Outro

• NEW KAIROS.FM PODCAST - Reclaiming UBI: Work and Values in the Age of AI
• Josh Steimle blog post - Will AI Destroy Jobs? 500 Years of Predictions Say No
• Smithsonian Magazine article - What the Luddites Really Fought Against
• ITIF report - Oops: The Predicted 47 Percent of Job Loss From AI Didn't Happen
• Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence journal article - AI, Universal Basic Income, and Power: Symbolic Violence in the Tech Elite's Narrative
• Time article - What to Know About Worldcoin and the Controversy Around It
• Wikipedia page - World (blockchain)

Zainab Majid, co-founder of Asymmetric Security, joins Jacob for a conversation on the intersection between AI Safety and cybersecurity, as well as the future of digital forensics. Drawing from years of incident response work, she explains how cyber attacks actually unfold, why AI is changing both offense and defense, and how her team is building AI-native tools to investigate breaches faster and more effectively. Other topics explored in this episode include trust in the AI/cybersecurity industries, the realities behind cybersecurity hype, and the challenge of keeping humans meaningfully involved as these systems become more capable. Zainab also gives practical, actionable advice on how you can protect yourself.

If you're interested in over 30 minutes of additional content, head on over to the Kairos.fm Patreon where you can become a subscriber for just $2 per month, which helps make this whole podcasting thing a bit more sustainable.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (04:34) - Zainab's Background
• (08:49) - Jacob & Zainab's History
• (16:03) - Founding Asymmetric Security
• (24:49) - How to Know Who You Can Trust
• (36:31) - The Threats Asymmetric Is Built to Fight
• (01:05:54) - What's Asymmetric Tackling Next?
• (01:15:33) - Glasswing, Dual Use, and Power Concentration
• (01:24:21) - The Relationship Between AI Safety & Cybersecurity
• (01:37:01) - Outro

• Asymmetric Security website
• EvalEval @ NeurIPS workshop paper - Rethinking CyberSecEval
• Meta AI report - Purple Llama CyberSecEval
• Anthropic press release - Project Glasswing
• Schneier on Security blogpost - What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity

Technology has been moving faster than policy for some time now, and the advent of AI isn't changing that, so what can we do to maintain safety despite uncertainty? Su Cizem has spent the last few years trying to answer that question. As an analyst at the Future Society, she works on global AI governance, specifically on building international consensus around AI red lines: the thresholds we collectively agree must never be crossed. In this conversation, Su walks through her path from philosophy to policy, the evolution of the global AI safety summit series, why voluntary commitments from AI labs aren't enough, and what it would actually take to make international cooperation on AI safety real.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (03:23) - From Philosophy to Policy
• (22:25) - What AI Governance Actually Means
• (26:49) - The Summit Series
• (43:01) - Drawing The Red Lines
• (01:10:51) - Can These Companies Govern Themselves?
• (01:24:01) - Breaking Into The Field
• (01:27:51) - Closing Thoughts & Outro

• Su's LinkedIn
• Global Call for AI Red Lines
• The Futures Society report - “Facing the Stakes of AI Together”: 2025 Athens Roundtable Report
• Politico article - How the global effort to keep AI safe went off the rails
• TechPolicy.Press article - A Timeline of the Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute
• The Guardian article - AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying
• Google and OpenAI Employee open letter - We Will Not Be Divided
• The Register article - Altman said no to military AI abuses – then signed Pentagon deal anyway
• SaferAI report - Evaluating AI Providers’ Frontier AI Safety Frameworks

Jacy Reese-Anthis, founder of Sentience Institute and researcher at Stanford, began his journey working for animal welfare, but is now finishing up his PhD with research in many different AI subfields at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, social science, and machine learning. While this may seem like an odd jump at first, Jacy shares how his work has all been centered around the idea of moral circle expansion. In this episode, we dig into what sentience actually means (or at least how we can begin to think about it), why anthropomorphization is more complicated than it sounds, and how language models may be able to be leveraged as an effective tool for social science research.

Jacy also shares his median AGI estimate somewhere in there, so stay tuned if you want to catch it.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (05:41) - From Animal Welfare to Digital Minds
• (09:00) - Founding Sentience Institute
• (22:00) - Defining Sentience
• (27:13) - The Anthropomorphization Problem
• (47:51) - Why "Digital Minds" (Not "Artificial Intelligence")
• (51:05) - LLMs as Social Science Tools
• (01:07:03) - Jacy’s AGI Timeline & The Singularity
• (01:09:23) - Final Thoughts & Outro

• Jacy's website
• Wikipedia article - Jacy Reese Anthis
• Sentience Institute website
• CHI paper - Digital Companionship: Overlapping Uses of AI Companions and AI Assistants
• ICML paper - LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method
• ACL paper - The Impossibility of Fair LLMs
• Wikipedia article - ELIZA effect
• The Atlantic article - How a Google Employee Fell for the Eliza Effect