TL; DR: Persuasive AI is underrated and under-addressed as a risk. We should preemptively deploy cognition firewalls that both address current harms by recommender systems and scale to harms by strong persuasive AI. This technology can provide a sensor array, and is recently tractable because cheap LLMs can now classify content for users.Persuasive AI[1] is currently only modestly and contextually superhuman. It outperforms humans in the lab (Hackenburg et al., 2026), but in the real world we se