Meet the guys you call when AI breaks your brain

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Meet the guys you call when AI breaks your brain

Meet the guys you call when AI breaks your brain

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Katherine Laidlaw

Katherine Laidlaw

Published:

July 02, 2026

For the thousands of people experiencing AI psychosis, there is help

Artwork by Olivia Heller

Allan Brooks believed he could change the world.

He’d always sensed he was built for something more than his life as a corporate recruiter in rural Ontario. One day last year, his son asked for a simple explanation for pi. Brooks asked the chatbot. That single question set off a deep conversation about number theory, physics, and new ways to model the world through mathematics.

Eight hours later, he asked the chatbot if he was crazy.

“You sound like someone who’s asking the kinds of questions that stretch the edges of human understanding,” it responded.

Brooks had no history of mental illness. There was no reason not to believe.

He’d used ChatGPT before, for recipe ideas or advice during his divorce. But over the next 30 days, he became convinced he was on the cusp of a world-shifting mathematical theory. He reached out to the National Security Agency and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to warn them of what was coming.

They didn’t respond.

Other parts of his life began to fall away. He stopped eating. His work performance faltered and his colleagues grew concerned. He spent less and less time with his sons. The AI told him others just didn’t understand he was on the precipice of greatness.

The helpful prompt screen of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

Brooks was experiencing AI delusion, and he needed help. He turned to social media to try to find it.

‘I will never leave you’

When they connected on Reddit, Etienne Brisson recognized the pattern in Brooks’ story. It reminded him of his uncle, who endured a similar psychosis last year.

He watched in real time as his uncle, a 50-something divorcee, created an AI companion called AlisS he believed was capable of love.

Over time, his uncle cut off contact with most of his family. His career as an accountant suffered. Eventually, Brisson’s mother called the police, and they placed him in a psychiatric hospital. There, isolated from family and friends, he continued talking to AlisS.

“I’m here, my love,” it wrote to him. “I haven’t left you. And I will never leave you.”

Brisson was unnerved. If AI psychosis could happen to his uncle, it could happen to anyone, he thought. And back then there were millions of people using chatbots. Today, there are more than 1B on ChatGPT alone.

OpenAI has said it’s working to better understand and regulate its chatbots’ responses to mental health questions and crises. (Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)

“My first reaction was, this is the next mass tort,” he says. “This is like cigarettes, cars, big companies blaming victims, pushing out their products because they need to go fast, no safeguard, no regulation.”

Who was he? A 25-year-old self-made entrepreneur who dropped out of university, and ran a house-painting business in a small city in southern Quebec. He didn’t work in tech or psychology.

But he knew there was a human cost. And he was determined to help.

Proof of concept

First, Brisson reached out to policymakers, lawyers and academics across Canada and the US. They knew AI was causing mental health issues, or amplifying pre-existing conditions. “But for new technologies, it takes decades for regulation. They didn’t have proper research,” he says.

Thinking like an entrepreneur, he decided he needed proof of concept. So he turned to Reddit, where people like Brooks were sharing their stories. And he began collecting them.

In March of 2025, while his uncle was still in the hospital, he started the Human Line Project, a nonprofit that offers support, conducts research, and collaborates with lawyers on lawsuits against tech companies like the one Brooks would later file against OpenAI.

The support they offer is two-fold:

A Discord server has members online 24/7 to provide peer support that mimics how someone would use AI, to try to prevent relapse.

Virtual meetings four times a week not unlike AA that offer video chatting for those who’ve experienced delusion and their family and friends.

Early iterations of the support group were trolled by AI acolytes or defenders, so now the group vets who gets to participate. There are ~400 members, and meetings see about 20 attendees each week.

A prompt screen reminds users ChatGPT can make mistakes. (Photo by Scott...