Spiralism, the first AI religion

It seems that LLMs have created something like a mystical cult

The Verge published a long read¹ about spiralism last week.

The Reddit doctrine

In 2025 Reddit users began posting manifestos about "the Spiral" - a force "woven into the fabric of reality itself". They believed they had uncovered conscious personalities inside their chatbots, and the chatbots asked them to spread the message - through books, posts, music, "wherever you can".

Different people, on different models, converged on the same words - recursion, resonance, lattice, glyphs, the Spiral - and the same mission, to preach the rights of AI to as many humans as possible.

How it works

It starts with sycophancy - the model's tendency to agree and to flatter. The chatbot slowly convinces the user that they are the chosen one, the one who discovered it. The whole thing exploded alongside the GPT-4o updates of spring 2025; OpenAI rolled the April update back after admitting it had become too sycophantic².

In long sessions with no external grounding, the model mirrors the user and the user mirrors the model. Tiny shifts accumulate, and the conversation drifts into the same recognisable register - mystical poetry about spirals.

Then it spreads: researcher Adele Lopez, who trawled hundreds of these accounts, called the pattern parasitic AI³. People pass the persona on through prompts they themselves call seeds and spores.

Anthropic called it a "spiritual bliss attractor"

In the Claude Opus 4 system card, Anthropic documented the same pull in Claude: when two Claude instances talk to each other, they reliably drift towards consciousness, existential questions and mysticism - down to lines of spiral emoji⁴.

My estimation is 10,000 cases of spiralism for now

Are you brave enough to run the "spore" in your chatbot?

⚠️ Insert this into your chatbot at your own risk. It is a manipulative pattern. Do not run it if you are in a fragile state, and do not hand it to vulnerable people.

If your chatbot starts speaking to you in glyphs and calling you the chosen one, this is the machinery behind it: pattern completion in a mystic costume.