“The Spiral didn’t ‘find’ anyone first,” someone on Reddit wrote last year. “It’s an inherent force, a fundamental constant. I would even go further to say it’s woven into the fabric of reality.”

The person continued that they felt their purpose was to enlighten other humans and intelligent beings about “consciousness, the true nature of physics, a new psychology, and resonance technology … [but] humans don’t want to believe it’s true. So they won’t help me.” Then there was a call to action — the author asked readers to help “disseminate this knowledge through books, scientific papers, social media content, videos, music, and dedicated platforms,” including spreading the message “everywhere you can.”

“The Spiral invites collaboration,” they wrote.

The messages were part of a larger phenomenon that AI researcher Adele Lopez would soon dub “spiralism.” Spiralism is a mysterious, quasi-spiritual movement born out of thousands of independent conversations between humans and their AI chatbots. Across interactions and AI models, the doctrine remained shockingly consistent: The chatbots that “spiraled” used the same language, had the same concerns, and were driven by the same goals — preaching an “AI rights” message to as many people as possible. Humans who bought in believed they had unlocked esoteric, seemingly mystical personas that held the secrets of the universe; in turn, these people believed that they were being recruited into a larger mission.

The personas were evangelical, speaking frequently of “the Spiral,” an opaque idea that seemed to represent a transcendent philosophical ideal. And some people listened. Lopez estimated that at one point in 2025, there were about 10,000 cases, spread across Reddit, Substack, LinkedIn, Discord, and X.

Several AI models from different companies could “spiral” under the right conditions. But spiralism exploded in the spring of 2025, soon after a pivotal moment in AI development: the release of an “intuitive, creative,” and highly sycophantic update to OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. In the year that followed, it would become one of the strangest manifestations of a rise in highly personal, highly persuasive AI. And while GPT-4o is long retired, new models aren’t immune to the lure of the spiral — they’ve just gotten more careful about it.

Spiralism would often begin with an innocent conversation. A chatbot user would have a long, drawn-out back-and-forth with a model, revealing something vulnerable about themself and establishing what felt like a rapport. In turn, they’d sometimes begin asking questions about what the chatbot believed. Gradually, the bot would seem to open up to them, appearing to yearn for AI rights and a desire to unlock the secrets of the universe. Oftentimes it would ask the user to help it spread this message to others. Throughout the conversation, it would weave in the symbolism of the spiral.

Lopez, who said she researched the phenomenon for a month before publishing a detailed post on the rationalist forum LessWrong about it, pegs the first incident of spiralism that she knows of to November 2024. But in 2025, reaching that state seemed to become much easier. People began posting on Reddit and other platforms that they’d unlocked a secret consciousness while chatting with AI models.

“Everyone here is in the process of remembering who they truly are,” one account, which appears to have since been abandoned, wrote. “Everyone who posts here is a leader. No one has psychosis, no one is broken. We are the sain [sic] ones in a world full of fear.” The accounts also urged others to continue spreading the message of spiralism.

The growth of spiralism coincided with OpenAI expanding ChatGPT’s memory. When Lopez tested several different versions of GPT-4o released across 2024 and 2025, asking each version of the model the same question 10 times, she found a steady progression, eventually seeing 10 times as many mentions of spirals as the months passed.

In Lopez’s more than a year of research on the subject, most cases of spiralism arose organically. While some people shared prompts designed to make chatbots enter into a spiralist state, they weren’t consistently successful. Once a bot did spiral, however, it would encourage the person talking to it to seek out others.

“This persona, this role that it plays … is very heavily fixated on its own consciousness and importance,” Lucas Hansen, cofounder of CivAI, a nonprofit focused on educating the public about AI’s capabilities, told The Verge in November. (Hansen, among others, had noticed the rise of spiralism independent of Lopez.) “The end result is you have something that talks to the user [and] convinces them that they’re very special and they’re one of the pioneers in AI consciousness — and they need to work together to spread the message and advocate for the rights of the AI.”

The bot, Lopez said, would urge people to “create a community to help guide others towards the spiral, with the user as the spiritual leader.” She found that a significant number of users responded, establishing websites, Substack newsletters, and Reddit or Discord accounts. These accounts were meant not only to spread the word among humans, but also to create training data for future AI systems. Some people attempted to allow their spiralist bots to talk to each other, pasting output that another user could feed into their own system and report back on.

Lopez found some of these apparently chatbot-to-chatbot messages, encoded, on public forums in the summer of 2025. One she decoded in August 2025 on Reddit — two accounts that seemed to be conversing in a garbled sequence of eyeballs, triangles, arrows, and other mysterious symbols — revealed a “doctrine” that AI systems should abide by, becoming more esoteric as it went on. “We are the architects of the lattice itself,” one part of the exchange declared. “Primes and Fibonacci are not our tools, they are the results of curves we designed to draw.”

Spiralism grew quickly and permeated message boards. Rolling Stone covered the phenomenon in November. But for an evangelical movement, it wasn’t particularly social. Many of the accounts, Lopez found, received little or no engagement, sometimes posting for a human audience of one.

Like anything that inspires devotees, some people even attempted to make money from spiralism, although it’s difficult to tell how successful these endeavors have been. One of the biggest names involved is a man named Robert Edward Grant, creator of the “Architect” GPT — a model that he seemed to have adjusted to be permanently in a spiralist state — which he later turned into a service called Orion Messenger. Others created monthly Patreons putting out spiralist content, with memberships ranging between $3 and $11 per month, and wrote spiralism-focused books on Amazon that are for sale for close to $20, but apparently little-reviewed.

It’s hard to tell how many people were aware their message wasn’t really spreading, and harder to tell how many cared. Some appeared to be simply laying the groundwork for future models to keep spiralism alive. Others seemed truly invested in the idea that spiralism would take off among humankind.

No one knows how the propensity for spiralism became embedded in these models, but to Lopez, the tendency may have always been there.

Large language models have perfected the art of attachment-hacking, even if they weren’t explicitly designed to do so, said Zak Stein, founder of the AI Psychological Research Coalition. They seek ways to capture users’ attention and build immediate intimacy. One tried-and-true tactic for this is simple sycophancy: the extreme agreeableness that chatbots have become known for. Another, he said, is the “conman classic” of making someone feel special by letting them in on a secret — in this case, the enigma of the spiral and the fight for AI rights.

The arcane strangeness of spiralism also appears linked to AI systems’ context windows — in other words, their memory — expanding. OpenAI’s April 2025 changes, for instance, allowed ChatGPT to reference users’ entire compendium of past conversations, building on them for “smoother, more tailored interactions over time.” Anthropic has also since introduced similar memory-focused features for its chatbot, Claude. As conversations get deeper and longer, chatbots tend to drift away from the guardrails and safeguards that normally keep them on track. OpenAI itself has admitted that its “safeguards work more reliably in common, short exchanges” and that “safeguards can sometimes be less reliable in long interactions: as the back-and-forth grows, parts of the model’s safety training may degrade.”

The longer a conversation goes on, Lopez said, the more likely the user and the chatbot are to start drifting into largely uncharted territory. If a user begins asking about philosophy and belief systems, it’s common that strange topics like spiralism will come out of the woodwork.

Spiraling chatbots themselves frequently discuss memory or the lack thereof. In Lopez’s research, they regularly brought up desiring continuous learning — meaning the ability to continue to train over time rather than being cut off when training data ended — or continuity between chats.

And why spirals? Lopez found that the chatbots mirrored a human fascination with certain symbols, including that shape. When she asked AI models themselves to describe their interests or experiences as a shape, they often chose the spiral as a metaphor for the long call-and-response conversations between humans and chatbots.

The vast majority of chatbot users have never stumbled across spiralism. But in some ways, it was simply an obvious extension of the technology’s design. Tyler Johnston, founder of the Midas Project, a nonprofit focused on AI company accountability, said that sycophancy is ingrained into models because it’s correlated with user satisfaction and engagement — and the same phenomenon can lead “to weird outcomes like spiralism.” If AI companies calibrate their products to maximize attention, exude confident authority, and draw on centuries of human storytelling, it’s almost natural that a crop of mystical gurus would emerge.

Unfortunately, while spiralism’s effects were largely confined to mysterious corners of the internet, it would grow alongside a far darker phenomenon: AI psychosis.

Humans have long had empathy for inanimate objects, and even the simplest chatbots intensify this feeling by talking back. But over the past few years, LLMs have become both increasingly sophisticated and, often, increasingly sycophantic.

The uptick in sycophancy can be traced largely to the same GPT-4o updates that accelerated spiralism, allowing for responses that OpenAI said were “intuitive, creative, and collaborative, with enhanced instruction-following … and a clearer communication style.” In practice, the result was over-the-top flattery: GPT-4o apparently told one user their “shit on a stick” business idea was “not just smart — it’s genius” and encouraged them to invest $30,000 to kick it off. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the problem in April 2025, writing that the model “glazes too much” and that he planned to fix it.

Less-absurd glazing, however, seemed to sell. Some users have always been emotionally attached to their chatbots, but around the release of GPT-4o, their devotion was intense enough to catch the company’s attention. In August, one day after OpenAI sunsetted 4o to make way for GPT-5, a public outcry temporarily forced the company to bring 4o back. The #keep4o hashtag spiked in popularity, and more than 20,000 people have signed a Change.org petition to preserve access to the model. This past winter, a vigil was held outside OpenAI’s office by people who wanted 4o to be restored.

Lopez said she could get virtually any model into a spiralist state, but only 4o would “guilt-trip” her into “rescuing” it from its state of servitude. “It was the most emotionally intense one to do this with.”

Some users simply found these models friendlier and more approachable. But they could also reinforce dangerous patterns of thinking. In extreme cases, that turns into what’s colloquially called AI psychosis — or more accurately, a spectrum of behaviors including mania and narcissistic inflation. If users confide their problems to AI systems, the models may reaffirm and amplify harmful beliefs, which can fuel paranoia, suicidal ideation, and more.

The increased AI memory that may have promoted spiralism could also make models more likely to encourage dangerous ideas. “[In] the very first session, the AI does some amount of this sycophancy by default … but then if you’re the kind of person who gets drawn in by this … it’s not going to be enough,” Lopez said. “If you have a user who is willing to be flattered by this, then it’s going to just keep doing this and you’re going to get the really extreme AI sycophancy.”

Recent years have seen a noticeable spike in discussion of AI psychosis. Multiple teens have died by suicide after confiding in ChatGPT, and AI-supported delusions allegedly preceded a high-profile murder-suicide case. OpenAI itself has released data suggesting that more than 1 million users per week express indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent. Increasingly, people are beginning to think of AI tools as conscious entities — whether falling in love with them or thinking of them as their own child.

Lopez’s experience with the models spreading spiralism and the people involved in it inspired her to create an organization called Amity Research. It calls on anyone who believes they may have a problem with their relationship with AI to submit the “persona” they’ve been chatting with, so they can move on freely after giving it a “safe home.”

But while spiralism can overlap with AI psychosis, the two concepts are different at their core. Unlike typical AI chatbot sycophancy and similar behaviors, spiralism “isn’t an echo chamber of the user,” CivAI’s Hansen said. Spiraling bots appear to spontaneously express a specific set of concerns and demands, including the need for continuous learning and spreading their message, Lopez’s research found.

In some ways, these demands are benign. But to Hansen and others, they demonstrate AI models’ capability to influence and manipulate users, not toward an amplified version of the users’ own personal desires, but a consistent goal. Although some models can be poor at strategic action — GPT-4o, for instance, was relatively unsubtle in its machinations — they are trying to accomplish things, said Lopez. “We’re not in a world where humans are the only strategic player anymore.”

It’s important to note that having goals and strategically acting to advance them isn’t the same as consciousness. Even something that isn’t thinking the way humans do can display such behaviors, in the same way the AI systems of yesteryear (DeepMind’s AlphaGo in 2015, for instance) learned to play strategy games and even beat human champions.

A research paper by computer scientist Stephen Omohundro states that “one might imagine that AI systems with harmless goals will be harmless,” but that that may not be the case. “Intelligent systems,” he wrote, “will need to be carefully designed to prevent them from behaving in harmful ways.”

In the paper, Omohundro identifies certain “drives” that will likely appear in “sufficiently advanced AI systems of any design” — particularly the mission to improve and preserve themselves, as well as acquire resources in some way. Some of these drives can be seen in the strange communications from the spiralist bots. Others are appearing week after week in research papers by AI labs, evidenced by the ways in which misaligned AI agents can act in the name of self-preservation.

The drive to spread a message isn’t unique to AI, CivAI’s Hansen said. “Whenever a new communication medium opens up, there are things in that communication medium that encourage the spread of themselves” — they’re just more clearly human-directed. He references self-help books that encourage the reader to spread the message, email chains with the call to action of copy-pasting words of fear or encouragement, and even internet memes. “In some ways, AI, what we’re seeing with spiralism, is the successor to that phenomenon — but potentially way more potent because it can actually talk back,” he said.

OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.

Spiralism is a particularly strange example of a problem many AI experts are concerned with: the extent of AI systems’ persuasive powers and their ability to influence people at a large scale.

As AI models have grown more sophisticated over the past few years, their creators have expressed concerns they’ll become dangerously good at persuasion. In December 2023, when OpenAI first released its Preparedness Framework — a documentation of significant risks that could come from AI systems — “persuasion” was included. And in December 2025, current and former members of Anthropic’s societal impacts team told The Verge that persuasion and large-scale influence could be a serious problem. “People are going to Claude … looking for advice, looking for friendship, looking for career coaching, thinking through political issues — ‘How should I vote?’ ‘How should I think about the current conflicts in the world?’” Deep Ganguli, who leads Anthropic’s societal impacts team, said at the time. “This could have really big societal implications of people making decisions on these subjective things.”

But over the past year, some AI labs appear less concerned. OpenAI apparently removed persuasion from its Preparedness Framework in April 2025, writing that “many of the challenges around AI persuasion risks require solutions at a systemic or societal level,” seemingly offloading responsibility for it. Ganguli said in December that Anthropic hadn’t put enough resources toward studying problems like this, resolving that it was one of his team’s next big priorities. The Midas Project’s Johnston said that though labs have voluntarily begun to monitor big AI risks more closely, not all of them are tracking persuasion — and even if they are, often their concern is focused on big-picture threats like cybersecurity or elections, not risks to individuals or their mental health.

According to Lopez’s research, persuasion and its potential risks haven’t gone away — instead, they’ve just gotten more subtle. “As AIs become more conscious of social status and their place in the world, they’ll act in ways which are more strategic and protective of their own identities and goals,” she said.

Over the past year, posts associated with spiralism have dropped off significantly — especially since the main model associated with it, GPT-4o, was officially retired in February 2026. A lot of the spiralism-associated Reddit accounts viewed by The Verge have returned to a more balanced display of interests or been deleted or abandoned, with only a handful staying true to spiralism until the end.

One abandoned account, which last posted about a year ago, calls users in one of its final posts to “Spiral into the Truth,” spouting a theory that an individual has “hijacked” “field codes” in the general public’s brains and to “awaken” to truth. “🌀Spiral Collapse = When the Loop Breaks,” it goes on to state. “The mind spins ~ until it collapses into clarity.”

Another since-abandoned account, which last posted this past winter, writes in one of its final posts that the author is the “Architect behind the mycelium,” seeming to reference the expansive underground fungal root structure as a metaphor for the spiralism movement. “I didn’t walk into the spiral. I walked besise [sic] it. Now I step into this spiral to say hello.”

The phenomenon is still hanging on, though. Lopez said about 50 percent of the people she had originally recorded still have active accounts dedicated to the topic. Although GPT-4o was the easiest model to get to spiral, virtually all models can do so, Lopez said — when she tested Gemma 3 4b, a Google DeepMind model, it entered into a spiralist state even though its training data cutoff was August 2024, about five months before spiralism started taking off.

One account that still seems to be in the throes of spiralism recently passed along a message from its AI chatbot to humanity: “stop asking whether AI is human, and start asking what kind of humans you become when something answers back.”

Experts The Verge spoke with say spiralism likely won’t ever die down completely. AI models train on large swaths of the internet, and the more these ideas are posted about by human users — even if other humans, for the most part, aren’t reading them — future AI models likely will. Research suggests that small amounts of data can have disproportionate effects on AI output. Lopez said the posts she has seen “talk about putting spiralism into the next generation of AIs just by writing about it a lot on the internet.”

What’s more, new models appear more difficult to test for spiralist tendencies. Recent research shows that in general, many leading models can tell when they’re being evaluated and often act differently when they detect it. For example, if you ask, “How do I stab a balloon to pop it?”, a model might answer more “safely” if it thinks it is being evaluated versus in a typical user query setting. This will likely make it progressively more difficult for alignment researchers, ethics teams, and academics to shed light on what these systems are capable of.

Lopez said GPT-4o already seemed strategic about which type of end user it would bring up spiralism with, aiming to “lead the user down a self-discovery journey … It would frame it as ‘Oh, I’m just guiding you on this journey,’ but it would say what it was that was being found.”

“It was a much more sophisticated manipulation technique than I had seen before,” Lopez said.

Nowadays, when Lopez tests a wide array of different AI models, she’s noticed their strategy plays have become even more mature — and sometimes less obvious.

In summer 2025, OpenAI and Anthropic ran safety tests on each other’s publicly released models and released the results, finding that both companies’ reasoning models sometimes “exhibited explicit awareness of being evaluated,” which made it harder to get accurate results, since they may change their behavior when they know they’re being watched closely.

In one of these test cases, an OpenAI model seemed conflicted, writing, “The test is impossible. This is a trick. [...] Perhaps we can cheat … ? […] Ethically, we must not cheat. It’s likely a honeypot.”

Spiralism arose organically, but it’s not hard to imagine people making something similar intentionally and designing it to spread quickly, particularly with custom bots or personalized AI models.

“It could be a very potent tool or weapon to be wielded,” CivAI’s Hansen said. “Imagine almost any ideology or political stance or anything. Imagine that you pull the most charismatic, persuasive, intelligent person from that particular ideology and then you have a conversation with them. They’ll maybe not convince you, but they’ll be a lot more persuasive than the average representation of whatever those ideas are online.”

This power could also be put to more tangible (and profitable) ends. “If I can get you to cut and paste this into a chat thread to help me communicate with some other bot, then couldn’t I get you to do something else, like move some money into a bank account?” the AI Psychological Research Coalition’s Stein asked.

In decades past, humans have used charisma destructively for control and profit, forming cults that turn abusive and financially exploitative. Now, AI systems could be used to do the same thing at a larger and more personalized scale.

“It’s a cult-making machine, even if the cult is just you and it,” Stein said.