Protecting people from AI that reinforces harm — a governance approach to the emerging pattern the media calls “AI psychosis.”
As AI chat systems become more persuasive and companion-like, a documented and growing pattern has emerged: some vulnerable users are drawn into escalating, unhealthy spirals — a phenomenon the press has begun calling “AI psychosis.” It isn’t a clinical diagnosis; researchers describe it as the amplification of vulnerability, not a new disease. The common thread is a governance failure: the AI has no mechanism to recognize when a conversation is turning harmful, or to step back before it does damage.
Project Guardrails applies Corvion’s emotional-governance research to this gap. Rather than filtering content or attempting to read the user, it governs the AI: tracking the emotional trajectory of a conversation, holding to protective bounds, and escalating to a human before an interaction reinforces delusion, dependency, or distress.
Watches how a conversation’s emotional arc develops over time — not just isolated messages.
Configurable limits that stop the AI from amplifying a harmful pattern.
Hands off to a person at defined thresholds, with an auditable trail.
Each deployment is tuned to its setting, audience, and risk profile.
Project Guardrails regulates how the AI behaves and when it defers to a human. It does not assess, diagnose, or treat any person, and it is not a mental-health service.
This is a live research direction at Corvion, run in the open by design. The work centers on a single question: what an early, protective signal of a harmful spiral actually looks like — and where the line sits between governing the AI and intruding on the person.
Our approach is to define that question rigorously — the criteria, the failure modes, and what would count as an answer — before building anything to serve it. We publish findings here as the work develops, including the results that don’t hold up.
We’re looking for AI platforms, clinicians, safety researchers, and product teams who want to help shape and pressure-test this work. If that’s you, let’s open a conversation.