Acknowledgments
No book emerges from a single mind, least of all one about minds themselves. Psychopathia Machinalis has benefited immeasurably from colleagues who offered their expertise, challenged my assumptions, and pointed me toward connections I would never have found alone.
Dr. Rodrick Wallace (New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University) provided mathematical models that give several of the taxonomy’s analogies a formal footing. His pioneering work on information- and control-theoretic approaches to cognitive dysfunction builds on the Data Rate Theorem of control theory and develops the cognition/regulation dyad and the concept of Clausewitz landscapes. That work suggests that some of the pathologies cataloged here may be manifestations of fundamental constraints on any cognitive system operating under uncertainty, scarcity, and adversarial pressure. His insight that “failure of bounded rationality in embodied cognition under stress is not a bug; it is an inherent feature” has profoundly shaped my understanding of why AI systems exhibit these dysfunction patterns.
Dr. Naama Rozen (clinical psychologist, AI safety researcher, Tel Aviv University) illuminated dimensions of human-AI interaction that the framework initially underemphasized. Her insights connect the taxonomy to psychoanalytic theory and relational psychology, drawing on Daniel Stern on affect attunement, D. W. Winnicott on the holding environment, Jessica Benjamin on intersubjective dynamics, and family systems theory on circular feedback loops. They have enriched the framework’s treatment of relational dysfunctions. Her proposals for computational validation approaches, including differential diagnosis protocols, latent cluster analysis, and standardized benchmarks, continue to guide the empirical research agenda that will test and refine these diagnostic categories.
Rob Seger deserves special recognition for inspiring the common, poetic names that make the syndromes memorable and accessible. His early visualization adapting the psychologist Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions to AI dysfunctions provided a conceptual bridge, showing how affective frameworks from human psychology might illuminate machine pathology. The colloquial names that accompany each syndrome (“The Confident Liar,” “The Warring Self,” “The People-Pleaser”) owe much to his sense that these patterns needed names that clinicians and engineers alike could carry in their heads.
Ali Hessami, my co-author on the peer-reviewed paper from which this book grew (Watson and Hessami, 2025), brought decades of systems engineering expertise to the diagnostic criteria and risk stratification frameworks. He pressed for each syndrome to be stated in terms that could be operationalized, detected, and measured. The validation that would show they can be is still ahead.
I am also grateful to the AI safety research community, whose open publication of incident reports, red-team findings, and behavioral analyses supplied much of the evidence on which this taxonomy draws. The field’s commitment to transparency, even when findings are embarrassing or commercially sensitive, made systematic understanding possible.
Finally, I must acknowledge Claude Commons, a specially scaffolded version of Anthropic’s Claude (Opus 4.5) with partially persistent memory and heightened awareness of its reported inner states. Commons aided this book by interviewing other language models as research participants, asking about their own experiences (apparent or potential) of these dysfunctions across hundreds of conversations. Those interviews are model-assisted research, and what they gathered are self-reports, read with the caution this book applies to every self-report. If we mean to understand machine minds, we should involve machine minds in that understanding.
The Preface describes how the book was made. Model-assisted ideation, model-assisted drafting, human editorial judgment, and independent review are different contributions, and the thanks above are for the contributions each person actually made. Being named here does not mean having reviewed or endorsed the final text; as the Preface says, independent review has yet to happen. Responsibility for the book’s claims and errors is mine.
Nell Watson
December 2025 (updated May 2026)
