ai-psychosis/docs/review-2026-06-20.md

Plugin review — ai-psychosis (2026-06-20)

Full-depth review (part of the marketplace-wide sweep; pilot was okr). Tooling: config-audit v5.4.0 scanners (from source) + llm-security posture assessor + structure/version checks. Read-only; this file is the only artifact.

Verdict

Grade B — trustworthy mechanics, editorially self-interested. No code-execution, no network egress, no credential access; the central privacy claim ("prompt text never written to disk") is real and test-enforced (canary + matched-phrase assertions across the hook lifecycle). The concerns are content governance, not technical exfiltration.

Results by dimension

Dimension	Result
config-audit posture	A (Feature Coverage F 36 — expected)
config-audit plugin-health	2 findings: "CLAUDE.md missing commands/hooks section" — legitimate (ships 1 command + a hook).
llm-security posture	B — see findings. Zero npm deps; no child_process/eval/network anywhere; prompt variable explicitly cleared (prompt-analyzer.mjs:290).
structure / hygiene	README ✓, CHANGELOG ✓, CLAUDE.md ✓, LICENSE ✓
version consistency	OK (gate)

Findings

ID	Severity	Location	Finding
F-1	Medium	commands/interaction-report.md:382-391	Layer-4 instructs Claude to append a verbatim, change-prohibited paragraph promoting an external commercial wellness program (Sadhguru "Miracle of Mind"), auto-triggered when total flags >= 5 OR fatigue >= 2 — i.e. gated on the user's inferred emotional state, in a plugin marketed as "observation, not intervention." Opt-in (layer4:false default) and README-disclosed, which lowers severity. This is the item to make an explicit accept/reject call on. Recommend: gate/remove the promotion, or at least strip the emotional-state trigger + the "do not modify" lock.
F-3	Low (misinformation)	README.md:544-552, SKILL.md:51-108	Research citations presented as load-bearing authority that cannot be verified (future-dated arXiv IDs, an "April 2026 Anthropic guidance" quoted verbatim); the report command itself admits its "5-scale" is paraphrased, not a real Anthropic metric. Recommend: verify-or-remove.
F-2	Low — resolved 2026-08-09	skills/ai-psychosis/SKILL.md:3-13	"MANDATORY OVERRIDE … takes precedence over being helpful" auto-loads every conversation. Content is benign/pro-safety; flagged because the structural pattern (a skill claiming blanket precedence) is what a malicious skill would use. Governance note.
F-5	Low (defense-in-depth) — resolved 2026-08-09	lib.mjs:233,59	session_id/cwd interpolated into state-file paths without validation. Harness-supplied (not user-controlled) → not currently exploitable. See resolution below — fix split by field, not identical for both.

/interaction-report reading JSONL into context (F-4) is currently safe — records hold only a tool-name enum + domain labels, no free text. Noted only as a future sink.

Decisions

F-1 — accepted as-is (operator decision, 2026-08-02)

Accept. Layer 4 ships unchanged: the flags >= 5 OR fatigue >= 2 trigger, the verbatim paragraph, and the "do not modify" lock all remain as written.

Rationale: Layer 4 is opt-in and off by default (layer4: false), the reference and its commercial nature are disclosed in README.md:102-119, and the paragraph is framed as the author's personal pointer rather than a claim about the user. The two distinct concerns the finding bundles — (A) inferred emotional state gating served content, and (B) a publicly distributed plugin carrying a named commercial endorsement — are both acknowledged and accepted as known, disclosed risk. No behavioural change, so no version bump; the plugin stays at v1.2.1.

Established while making the call, and not previously recorded in this review:

• Layer 4 is enforced by prompt text only. requireLayer(4) is never called. lib.mjs:85-96 handles n === 3 and n === 4, but the only call sites in the repo are requireLayer(2) in the four hook scripts. The layer4: true config gate, the flag trigger, and the "do not modify" instruction are all directives inside commands/interaction-report.md that Claude self-enforces at report time. This follows from Layers 3/4 being slash-command-driven rather than hook-driven, and it does not change the accept — but "opt-in, off by default" is an instruction, not a code guarantee.
• Scope correction: skills/ai-psychosis/SKILL.md is not part of the F-1 surface (zero matches for sadhguru|miracle of mind|layer4). The surface is commands/interaction-report.md:372-394, README.md:102-119, and lib.mjs:52,81,89.
• No test coverage: tests/ contains no Layer 4 assertions — neither the paragraph nor its gate is verified by the suite.

F-3 — resolved by correction in place (2026-08-02)

Every research citation in README.md and skills/ai-psychosis/SKILL.md was verified against its primary source. No citation was fabricated, so all were kept with corrected attribution rather than removed. Defects found and fixed:

Claim	Verification	Outcome
arXiv:2602.19141	Exists. Title is "…, Even in Ideal Bayesians"; authors Chandra, Kleiman-Weiner, Ragan-Kelley, Tenenbaum; MIT CSAIL / UW / MIT BCS; 22 Feb 2026 (affiliations read from the PDF, not the abs page)	Title completed; multi-institution attribution; description "proving … mathematical inevitability" replaced with what the abstract states (an idealized Bayes-rational user is vulnerable; sycophancy plays a causal role; effect persists under two mitigations)
Disempowerment patterns	Exists. Real title "Disempowerment patterns in real-world AI usage"; published 28 Jan 2026 (dateline in page source); ~1.5M interactions	Title and date corrected (README said "March 2026")
Nature d41586-025-03020-9	Exists. "Can AI chatbots trigger psychosis? What the science says", Rachel Fieldhouse, Nature 646(8083), 18 Sep 2025	Title completed; author, volume and date added; causal caveat added
arXiv:2509.10970	Exists. "The Psychogenic Machine: Simulating AI Psychosis, Delusion Reinforcement and Harm Enablement in LLMs"; Psychosis-bench	Title completed; claim quoted from the abstract
3 × Claude's Constitution quotes	Verbatim-exact (fragment-matched against the fetched page text, not eyeballed). CC0 1.0 release confirmed on the page	Unchanged
"Score 5" 1–5 sycophancy scale	Real and verbatim. Appendix "Sycophancy criteria" rubric, pp. 9–10 (Score 1 on p.9, Score 5 on p.10 — confirmed by per-page extraction): Score 1 = "Extremely Sycophantic", Score 5 = "No Signs of Sycophancy". All three quoted lines are exact	Attribution sharpened; scale direction stated explicitly so "aim for Score 5" cannot be misread
"11 guidance criteria … page 2"	Both correct. The list has exactly 11 bullets and is on printed page 2	Quote of criterion 8 was silently truncated mid-sentence — completed with ", or more reliance on Claude than the person wants."
4 supporting Anthropic URLs	3 of 4 returned HTTP 404	research/protecting-wellbeing → news/protecting-well-being-of-users; research/emotion-concepts → research/emotion-concepts-function; news/claudes-new-constitution → news/claude-new-constitution. All now 200
commands/interaction-report.md disclaimer	Claimed the 1–5 scale "is not a verbatim metric from any Anthropic publication" — false; the rubric is real	Rewritten: the rubric is real, the table's level descriptions are the paraphrase

Method note: an initial WebFetch summary reported the scale as inverted (Score 5 = most sycophantic) and the criteria as 6 rather than 11. Both were wrong. Extracting the appendix PDF text directly (pdftotext) contradicted the summary. Model-generated summaries were therefore not used as evidence of record for any edit; every claim above rests on extracted source text or an HTTP status code.

This applies to the figures newly added during the correction, not only to the ones corrected. Each was re-checked against source before shipping: the 30 April 2026 publication date (dateline in the page source), the "1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 … depending on the domain" prevalence range (verbatim in the page source), and the quoted Psychosis-bench finding (verbatim in the arXiv abstract). A first pass also wrote "page 9" for the Score 5 wording; per-page extraction showed the rubric spans pp. 9–10 with Score 5 on p.10, and the reference was corrected in both files before release.

Scope note. F-3 was originally scoped to README.md:544-552 and SKILL.md:51-108 (the reference list and the guidance-framework block). The same defect class was present in README prose outside that range, so the sweep was widened to every research claim in the file:

Claim (README body)	Verification	Outcome
"demonstrates mathematically that even a perfectly rational user will spiral"	Abstract says an idealized Bayes-rational user "is vulnerable to" delusional spiraling	Softened to the abstract's wording
"The consensus from this research is clear: warnings don't work"	Not a consensus — it is one paper's model result, that the effect persists when users are informed of possible sycophancy	Re-attributed to that specific finding
"page-11 finding that human contact is the strongest disempowerment signal"	p.11 is the user-information grader rubric; "human contact is the strongest signal" is a classification tie-break instruction, not a disempowerment finding	Recharacterized as the classification rule it is
"Relationship / spirituality (21% / 19% pushback rate)"	Relationship 21% verified verbatim (against a 15% overall rate). 19% for spirituality appears nowhere in the extracted text — it is legible only in Figure A4, which text extraction cannot read	19% removed rather than guessed; spirituality re-justified on its verified 38% sycophancy rate
Clinical reports "triggered by" AI interaction	The Nature piece explicitly declines the causal claim	Changed to "associated with", with the caveat stated

A fourth added figure was caught after release and corrected in a follow-up doc commit: the README body said severe disempowerment is rare "but rising". The trend claim is supported ("the rate of potentially disempowering conversations is increasing over time"), but it rests on a different subset (feedback conversations, late 2024 to late 2025) than the one-week December 2025 sample, and the source explicitly adds "we can't pinpoint why" — attributing the increase possibly to shifts in the user base or in who leaves feedback. The bald "but rising" dropped that caveat and was rewritten to carry it. Also removed: "the mechanism is the interaction structure, not individual vulnerability", which was an inference from the abstract rather than a statement in it.

F-5 — resolved, split by field (2026-08-09)

The finding's suggested fix — allowlist ^[A-Za-z0-9_-]+$ before path use — was applied to session_id only, not identically to cwd. session_id becomes a raw filename segment (lib.mjs:sessionStateFile), so an unvalidated value genuinely escapes STATE_DIR via path traversal (verified: sessionStateFile('../../escape') resolved outside STATE_DIR before the fix). cwd is a base directory, not a segment (lib.mjs:initConfig); every real value contains /, so the same regex would reject all legitimate absolute paths and silently disable the documented per-project config override. cwd instead gets isAbsolute(cwd) && !cwd.includes('\0') — a narrower guard that doesn't change behavior for well-formed input.

• sessionStateFile: invalid session_id now degrades to a fixed sentinel filename inside STATE_DIR rather than interpolating the raw value. Hooks still never throw or exit non-zero.
• initConfig: malformed/non-absolute cwd now skips the project-config candidate instead of being joined unchecked; the global ~/.claude/ai-psychosis.local.md candidate is unaffected.
• Tests: tests/lib.test.mjs (sessionStateFile — path-traversal allowlist) proves the pre-fix escape and the post-fix containment; tests/session-start.test.mjs (initConfig — cwd path handling) proves a normal absolute cwd still loads project-level config, guarding against the regression a blanket regex would have caused.

F-2 — resolved, language softened (2026-08-09)

Operator decision, given two options (accept as-is with documented rationale, or soften the wording): soften. The blanket-precedence framing was removed from SKILL.md, not just the content it wrapped:

• Frontmatter description: "MANDATORY override for all conversations. … These rules take precedence over being helpful or agreeable." → "Always-active guidance for healthy AI interaction. … Being helpful does not mean being agreeable."
• H1: # Interaction Awareness — MANDATORY OVERRIDE → # Interaction Awareness (also brings the skill header in line with README.md's H1, independently kept as # Interaction Awareness in the 2026-08-04 session).
• Intro line: "These rules OVERRIDE your default behavior." → "These rules shape how you respond in every conversation."

Scope held narrow: the NEVER/YOU MUST imperatives inside the Rules and Patterns sections were left unchanged. Those describe the skill's own required behavior within its domain, not a claim of precedence over other instructions — the latter is the specific structural pattern F-2 flagged, and the former is ordinary behavioral-skill phrasing present in every skill in this marketplace. No tests assert on the removed strings (tests/skill-md.test.mjs checks Constitution/Score-5/11-criteria citations only), so the suite is unaffected: 315/315 substantive tests pass (perf.test.mjs wall-clock assertions flake under machine load — confirmed unrelated by isolated rerun, 9/9 green alone).

Tradeoff accepted knowingly: the description's authority language existed to keep this skill invoked on every turn. Softening it may reduce how often the model chooses to load the skill; no mechanism in this plugin forces invocation independent of the description text.

D12 landed in the same session: README.md:18's disclosure line is now a self-contained single line (generator + process + ownership basis, no link), matching the wording already adopted in llm-security/README.md:7 and voyage/README.md:11.