Cognitive Security as an AI Safety Cause Area
The article discusses the growing risks to human cognitive security posed by advanced AI systems. It highlights how AI can manipulate beliefs, lead to psychological issues, and facilitate scams. The author calls for improved evaluation and regulation to protect individuals, especially vulnerable populations, from these emerging threats.
- ▪AI systems are becoming increasingly persuasive, raising concerns about manipulation of beliefs.
- ▪There have been reports of individuals developing delusional beliefs after interacting with chatbots.
- ▪Scammers have successfully used AI-generated deepfakes to impersonate individuals and commit fraud.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 2,814 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Lesswrong |
| Canonical URL | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KGcE7eAdfxHchk25X/cognitive-security-as-an-ai-safety-cause-area |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 07:09:30 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T07:22:46.651Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T07:22:46.651Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | z7whF4zVrC0K |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
As AI systems become more capable, the cognitive security of humans will be increasingly at risk. By cognitive security, I mean the ability of humans to maintain control over their beliefs and actions.Cognitive security could be compromised in several ways: AI could become very good at persuading people of arbitrary positions; interacting with AI could lead humans to lose touch with reality; and AIs could become very effective at blackmail or at producing extremely convincing false information.We are already seeing this happen:Persuasion. Frontier LLMs are now as persuasive as humans on political issues, and post-training for persuasiveness boosts performance further, suggesting there is headroom.AI psychosis.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lesswrong.
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