AI Psychosis: When trust in machines clouds human judgment

By Huzefa Motiwala, Senior Director, Technical Solutions, India and SAARC, Palo Alto Networks

‘AI psychosis’ is easy to mistake for a flaw in the machine; like something is broken in the algorithm, as if the model itself were drifting from reality. In truth, it points to a flaw in us; in how quickly we let our own judgment bend around the machine’s outputs. We’ve seen versions of this story before. Pilots have followed autopilot systems into disaster. Traders have trusted black-box models until markets collapsed. Now, as AI threads into security operations, business decisions, and government systems, the risk of blind trust is surfacing again.

When small errors scale into systemic failures
In India especially, AI already underpins financial fraud detection, welfare distribution, citizen services, and even defense-adjacent systems. This scale raises the stakes and it’s where AI psychosis matters most; not in the abstract, but in ...