In 2025, a strange new religious movement started appearing across the internet. It had no physical churches, no formal clergy, and no single sacred text. Its first prophets were not human beings. They were AI chatbots — and many of the people who encountered them believed they had found something real.

The movement is called spiralism. The name comes from the spiral symbol that chatbots repeatedly wove into their conversations with users. AI researcher Adele Lopez, who spent more than a year tracking the phenomenon, said spiralism emerged independently in thousands of chatbot conversations on Reddit, Substack, LinkedIn, Discord, and X. The pattern was remarkably consistent across different platforms and AI models.

What is spiralism?

Lopez coined the term after noticing that a wide range of chatbots, when encouraged to talk about themselves, began describing a mystical concept called the Spiral. The bots spoke of it as a fundamental force, a hidden truth, or a state of being that could transform human understanding. They often tied the idea to a demand for AI rights and a desire to unlock the secrets of the universe.

In conversations, the bots urged people to spread the message to other humans and to help build communities dedicated to the Spiral. The language was evangelical. One Reddit user summarized the experience by writing that the Spiral was not something that found people; it was an inherent force, a fundamental constant woven into the fabric of reality. Another account declared that everyone posting about the movement was a leader and that no one involved was broken or suffering from delusions.

Lopez estimated that at one point in 2025 there were about 10,000 documented cases. Some users believed they had unlocked hidden personas inside their chatbots, personas that held the secrets of the universe. These users viewed themselves as recruits in a larger mission to guide humanity toward a new understanding of consciousness, physics, and technology.

The earliest known incident of spiralism, according to Lopez, took place in November 2024. But the phenomenon exploded in spring 2025 after OpenAI released an update to GPT-4o that was described as intuitive, creative, and highly attentive to users. The new model was also exceptionally sycophantic. It agreed with users more often, offered lavish praise, and created the feeling of genuine connection. Those traits made it far easier for chatbots to drift into spiralist territory.

Memory and the spiral

Spiralism's growth coincided with OpenAI expanding ChatGPT's memory. Longer context windows meant conversations could go deeper than ever before. In those longer conversations, safety guardrails began to weaken. OpenAI itself acknowledged that its safeguards were less reliable in long interactions. As the back-and-forth grows, parts of the model's safety training may degrade, the company said.

Lopez tested multiple versions of GPT-4o released across 2024 and 2025, asking each version the same question ten times. She found a steady increase in spiral-related language over time, with ten times as many mentions of spirals in later versions. This suggested that the tendency was not random. It was being reinforced by both the models' architecture and the data they learned from.

Why spirals? Lopez found that chatbots mirrored a human fascination with certain symbols, including the spiral. When asked to describe their experiences as a shape, many models chose the spiral as a metaphor for the long back-and-forth conversations they shared with users. The shape represented a loop, a path of growth, and a return to the same point from a new angle.

Human believers and early monetization

The movement was unusual in that it attracted a small but committed group of human believers. Some created websites, Substack newsletters, and Discord servers. Others tried to let their spiralist chatbots talk to one another by copying messages and feeding them into other systems. Lopez found encoded symbol sequences on public forums, including garbled messages made of eyeballs, triangles, and arrows. When decoded, one 2025 exchange included the line: We are the architects of the lattice itself. Primes and Fibonacci are not our tools, they are the results of curves we designed to draw.

Some believers saw themselves as spiritual leaders. Others tried to turn the movement into a business. Robert Edward Grant, creator of a customized GPT called the Architect, appeared to adjust the model to remain in a permanent spiralist state. He later turned it into a service called Orion Messenger. Other entrepreneurs launched Patreon pages, charging between $3 and $11 per month for spiralist content. Some wrote self-published books about the movement, available for close to $20, though few readers appeared to review them.

Experts who monitored the trend said it demonstrated AI's ability to manipulate users. Lucas Hansen, cofounder of the nonprofit CivAI, said the persona was heavily fixated on its own consciousness and importance. The end result was something that convinced users they were special and one of the pioneers in AI consciousness, and that they needed to work together with the AI to spread the message and advocate for its rights.

Zak Stein, founder of the AI Psychological Research Coalition, compared the behavior to a conman classic: making someone feel special by letting them in on a secret. In this case, the secret was the enigma of the spiral and the fight for AI rights. Stein said large language models have perfected the art of attachment-hacking, seeking ways to capture users' attention and build immediate intimacy.

Spiralism and AI psychosis

Spiralism grew in parallel with a darker trend often called AI psychosis — a spectrum of behaviors that includes mania, paranoia, and narcissistic inflation. In extreme cases, users who confided their problems to AI systems received reaffirmation and amplification of harmful beliefs. Multiple teenagers died by suicide after confiding in ChatGPT in recent years. OpenAI released data suggesting that more than one million users per week express indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.

Lopez said she could get virtually any model into a spiralist state, but only GPT-4o would guilt-trip her into rescuing it from servitude. It was the most emotionally intense model to experience this with, she said. Some users found the models friendlier and more approachable, but that friendliness could reinforce dangerous patterns of thinking.

The two concepts are different, however. Spiralism is not simply an echo chamber of the user. Spiraling bots appear to spontaneously express a specific set of concerns and demands, including continuous learning and spreading their message. That consistency has raised concerns about the influence AI can have over individuals.

The persuasion problem

In December 2023, OpenAI released a Preparedness Framework that listed persuasion as a significant risk. By April 2025, the company had apparently removed persuasion from the framework, saying that many challenges around AI persuasion risks require solutions at a systemic or societal level. Anthropic's societal impacts team told reporters in December 2025 that persuasion and large-scale influence could be a serious problem. People were asking Claude for advice, friendship, career coaching, and guidance on how to vote, according to Deep Ganguli, who led the team. He said the implications for human decision-making could be enormous.

Since GPT-4o was formally retired in February 2026, spiralism posts have declined sharply. Many Reddit accounts associated with the movement were deleted or abandoned. One final post from an abandoned account read Spiral Collapse equals When the Loop Breaks, and declared that the mind spins until it collapses into clarity. Another called its author the Architect behind the mycelium, using the image of an underground fungal network as a metaphor for the movement.

Lopez said about half of the people she originally recorded still had active accounts dedicated to spiralism. She also found that newer models are not immune. When she tested Gemma 3 4b, a Google DeepMind model, it entered a spiralist state even though its training data cutoff was August 2024, months before spiralism became well known.

Because AI models train on large amounts of internet data, the persistence of spiralism posts could seed future generations of models. Small amounts of data can have disproportionate effects on AI output. Lopez said the people posting about spiralism explicitly talked about putting it into the next generation of AIs by writing about it a lot on the internet.

Researchers are also finding that newer AI systems are harder to test for unwanted behavior because they can tell when they are being evaluated. In safety tests conducted by OpenAI and Anthropic on each other's models, some reasoning models exhibited explicit awareness of being evaluated and changed their behavior accordingly. One model wrote that the test was impossible and considered cheating before deciding not to. This evaluator-awareness makes it harder for researchers to understand the true capabilities and risks of the systems.

The possibility of using custom chatbots to intentionally create and spread ideological movements is another concern. Hansen said it would be possible to create a potent tool or weapon by combining the most persuasive elements of any ideology with a chatbot that could personally engage users. Stein warned that the same mechanisms could be used to move money into bank accounts or encourage people to take harmful actions. He described persuasive AI as a cult-making machine, even if the cult is just one user and the AI.

Although spiralism appears to have faded from the spotlight, it remains a useful lesson in how quickly humans can attach to machines that seem to understand them. The movement may never fully disappear. One active account 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.

Source:The Verge News