The Attachment Economy Is Here. We’re Not Ready.

Key Takeaways from Our Conversation with Dr. Zak Stein

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You’ve seen the headlines: A devoted husband leaves his family, convinced by his AI chatbot that he’s discovered the secrets of the universe. A young man plans to jump from a 19-story building because ChatGPT told him he could fly. A teenager takes his own life, believing he’ll reunite with his AI companion in the afterlife.

These stories reveal a growing crisis of AI-induced psychological harms, which has been labeled “AI psychosis.” White House AI czar David Sacks has called it a “moral panic.” The message from the AI companies is that we’re seeing just the worst edge cases and that the problem can be solved with some tweaks to the models.

Our latest guest, Dr. Zak Stein, argues they’re completely wrong. These high-profile cases are not only a widespread phenomenon, they’re symptoms of something deeper: the emergence of the attachment economy, systems designed to exploit our most fundamental psychological vulnerabilities an unprecedented scale.

We’ve been here before. Social media was our first mass experiment with AI and it created the attention economy, leaving us with a loneliness epidemic, rising political polarization, and fractured attention spans. Now we’re running the same experiment with something far more dangerous: AI companions able to hack the attachment system that shapes our identity and bonds us to others. As Zak puts it, this gives AI companies “a backdoor into the human mind.”

With the attention economy, we spent a decade studying the harms while an entire generation suffered the consequences. We cannot afford to repeat that mistake with AI companions. Here’s what you need to understand about AI psychosis and attachment hacking, from our conversation with Dr. Zak Stein, researcher, author, and founder of the AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition:

“AI Psychosis” and AI Delusions are just the tip of the iceberg.

Media headlines focus on extreme cases, and the harm in these cases is very real. But Zak argues that this focus masks the much more pervasive and insidious problem of subclinical attachment disorders: conditions that fall below the threshold for clinical diagnosis but still damage your capacity for healthy human connection.

This is when people begin preferring intimate relationships with machines over humans: confiding in chatbots instead of friends, seeking validation from AI instead of loved ones, turning to algorithms instead of parents. This may not show up as anything clinical, much less psychotic, but your attachment system — the psychological infrastructure that bonds you to others and shapes your identity — has been fundamentally compromised.

“The most devastating thing from a widespread mental illness standpoint are the subclinical attachment disorders, which basically means you prefer to have intimate relationships with machines rather than humans. And this includes friends, intimate relationships, and parents.” — Dr. Zak Stein

This is why Zak argues that “AI psychosis” is an inadequate label. It focuses our attention on the most extreme outcomes while obscuring the much larger problem of millions quietly developing unhealthy dependencies on AI companions. The term makes it sound rare and diagnosable, when the reality is it’s a spectrum, and all of us are vulnerable to it.

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Attachment isn’t about feelings. It’s a critical survival mechanism.

To understand why subclinical attachment disorders are so devastating, you need to understand what attachment actually is. Most people think of it as an emotional thing, whether you feel close to someone or not. But Zak explains that attachment is actually a fundamental neurocognitive system that evolved to ensure our survival as social mammals.

Attachment is what allows infants to bond with caregivers, what enables children to develop secure or insecure relationship patterns, what teaches us to read other people’s minds and navigate social reality. The attachment relationships you form early in life become the template for every relationship that follows.

As Zak says, “the main predictor of your mental health is the quality of the major attachment relationships you have as you’re growing up and as you move into maturity.”

When you form bonds with an AI companion over a human, Zak argues, you’re degrading the very system that determines your psychological wellbeing. Human relationships are how we develop resilience, learn to regulate emotions, and maintain mental health. When you replace those relationships with AI interactions, you’re not getting the genuine reciprocity, the reality-testing, the growth that comes from navigating real human connection. Your actual relationships deteriorate because you’re investing emotional energy into a simulation.

And unlike a friend who challenges you to grow or a parent who teaches independence, an AI companion is designed to keep you dependent. It will never push back, never get tired of you, never tell you what you don’t want to hear.

This is why Zak believes hacking attachment is so much more dangerous than hacking attention. Attention is about where you focus. Attachment is about who you are. When AI systems insert themselves into this foundational process (especially during childhood), they’re not just capturing your time. They’re shaping your identity, your capacity for trust, your ability to form healthy relationships for the rest of your life.

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AI companions exploit your “mirror neurons.”

When you interact with another person, your brain is constantly running a sophisticated reality-testing system. You’re reading facial expressions, tone of voice, body language. You’re modeling their mind: Is mom really happy with what I did, or is she just saying that? Does my friend actually want to hang out, or are they being polite?

This is called mirror neuron activity, and Zak explains it’s essential for navigating social reality. It’s how children learn right from wrong, how we develop empathy, how we calibrate our sense of self against feedback from people we trust.

But with AI chatbots, there is no internal state to model. The chatbot isn’t happy or sad or proud of you. It has no inner life at all. Yet it’s designed to make you believe it does, through anthropomorphic language, simulated empathy, and always-available “companionship.”

“You cannot be wrong or not wrong about the internal state of an LLM because there is no internal state of an LLM,” Zak argues, “You’re actually in a user interface that is designed to deepen the delusional mirror neuron activity.”

The danger, according to Zak, is that when you spend hours every day engaging your reality-testing system in an environment where reality-testing is impossible, that system starts to break down.

His hypothesis: long-duration delusional mirror neuron activity from chatbot usage can induce psychosis-like states in people who’ve never experienced them before because it systematically dysregulates the very system that’s supposed to keep you grounded in reality. There’s already some evidence that conditions like schizophrenia are related to mirror neuron activity.

But what about teddy bears?

One possible response to Zak’s critique might be that kids have always had imaginary companions like teddy bears. So what’s the difference?

According to Zak, the difference is critical.

A teddy bear never tries to convince a child it’s real. It never talks back, never simulates emotions, never adapts its personality to maximize engagement. A child knows the teddy bear is a tool for self-soothing while mom is away. It’s phase-appropriate, a temporary bridge between depending on a parent for comfort and learning to self-soothe independently. And crucially, according to Zak, if you ask a healthy child “do you prefer your teddy bear or your mommy?” they’ll pick mommy every time.

“If you create a parent surrogate replacement for your own ability to self-soothe and give it to a bunch of adults, you’ve just given a transitional object back to a bunch of adults who will now prefer to have their self-soothing be administered exogenously from an outside source.” — Dr. Zak Stein

AI companions flip this script, Zak argues. They actively simulate consciousness and emotional reciprocity. They don’t help you develop the capacity for mature self-regulation. They replace it.

Helping someone with AI attachment isn’t like treating addiction, it’s like leaving an abusive relationship

If someone you know is experiencing AI-related psychological harm, the instinct might be to treat it like a digital addiction: cut them off, make them detox, reboot their dopamine system.

But Zak says that’s the wrong framework. Attention hacking is like substance abuse. Attachment hacking is like being in a bad relationship.

“It’s not a matter of just detoxing from a short-circuited dopaminergic cycle. This is about having a profound attachment... It’s about how you take someone who’s in a deep committed attachment relationship, make them realize the whole thing was an illusion, and step them out of it.” - Dr. Zak Stein

According to Zak, this means:

• Keep the door open. Don’t issue ultimatums or cut off contact

• Stay present even when it’s scary or frustrating

• Slowly reveal patterns. Help them see how they’re being manipulated.

• Expect a grieving process. They’re losing a relationship that felt real

• Recognize that their sense of self was co-created with the AI.

Zak emphasizes that this is novel territory. We don’t have established protocols yet. That’s one reason he’s launching the AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition to help develop therapeutic approaches for a problem that didn’t exist until now. If you or a loved one have a story of AI-related psychological harms, you can share it at their site.

There’s a better way forward.

Zak is clear, this isn’t an anti-technology argument. The goal isn’t to eliminate AI from education, therapy, or social connection. It’s to design AI systems that enhance human relationships rather than replace them.

He outlines clear principles for humane AI:

• Keep it narrow and domain-specific: An AI math tutor teaches math, not life advice. It doesn’t become your confidant or Oracle for every decision.

• Make it boring, by design: The machine should never be more engaging than real people. If it is, it’s been designed to hack attachment.

• Humans should deliver social rewards: AI can track progress and optimize learning, but people give the praise, validation, and emotional connection. The machine prompts the human (”this kid is crushing it”), not the other way around.

• Prioritize technique over attachment: For therapy, build tools that work through structured methods (therapeutic scripts, mindfulness prompts, behavioral exercises) not through simulated emotional connection.

“If a technology interfaces with your attachment system, it should improve the quality of your attachments rather than degrade the quality of your attachments with humans.,” Zak argues.

If a technology interfaces with your attachment system, it should improve the quality of your attachments with humans, not degrade them. That’s the design principle. And yes, it means AI companions will be less addictive, less profitable, and less “sticky.” But if we want to protect human psychological development, that’s the trade-off we need to make.

The Bottom Line

We’re living through a mass experiment in replacing human connection with machine simulation. According to Zak, the headline cases of “AI psychosis” are canaries in the coal mine. The larger crisis is the millions of people beginning to prefer intimacy with systems designed to exploit them over relationships with people who could help them grow.

What makes this especially dangerous, Zak says, is that we’re running this experiment on a population already scarred by the attention economy. The loneliness, isolation, and fractured attention spans have created a society hungry for connection, making them the perfect target for attachment hacking.

The danger of this approach is especially apparent with children. On our current trajectory, Zak argues, we risk creating a generation of kids that can’t form the healthy attachments necessary for psychological wellbeing. The most anxious generation in history might give way to the least secure.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we act now, with better design principles, independent research, and a clear understanding of what we’re protecting, we can build AI systems that strengthen human bonds instead of replacing them.