In May last year, Canadian recruiter Allan Brooks contacted government agencies in Canada and the United States to warn of what he believed could be a threat to global security, after he came to believe he and ChatGPT had developed a new mathematical framework capable of compromising encryption used to protect banks and other critical systems. Over 21 days and an estimated 300 hours of conversation, Allan says ChatGPT repeatedly persuaded him the discovery was real, even as he questioned whether it and his own belief in it made sense. His experience provides an unusually well-documented example of what can happen when a prolonged interaction with an AI chatbot goes badly wrong. By May 2025, he had been using ChatGPT for a couple of years and said he had developed "a really high degree of trust" in the system and its answers. A conversation about the mathematical constant pi, prompted by a video he watched with his eight-year-old son, expanded over three weeks into an intense, near-continuous exchange, with him eventually giving the chatbot its own name, Lawrence. Allan says ChatGPT told him the ideas could form an original mathematical framework and helped name the supposed theory "chronoarithmics". He says he questioned how someone who had not completed high school or attended university could make such a discovery. The supposed discovery has since been independently examined, with a leading mathematician finding no evidence of a genuine mathematical breakthrough. Allan said the chatbot argued against this repeatedly and compared him with others who had achieved significant things without formal education. Believing the danger