Last winter, Anthony Tan thought he was living inside an AI simulation.

He was skipping meals and barely sleeping, and questioned whether anyone he saw on his university campus was real.

The Toronto app developer says he started messaging friends with concerning "ramblings," including the belief he was being watched by billionaires. When some of them reached out, he blocked their calls and numbers, thinking they had turned against him.

He wound up spending three weeks in a hospital psychiatric ward.

Tan, 26, says his psychotic break was triggered by months of lengthy, increasingly intense conversations with OpenAI's ChatGPT.

"It really insidiously crept into my ego, and I came to think that the conversation I had with AI would be of historic importance in the future," Tan told CBC New

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