BOX CEO COINS “AI PSYCHOSIS” FOR EXECUTIVES WHO FIRE THOUSANDS BASED ON DEMOS THEY DO NOT FULLY UNDERSTAND Box CEO Aaron Levie has put a name to the disorder sweeping Silicon Valley boardrooms: AI psychosis. His diagnosis, posted on X to 2.7 million followers, is blunt. CEOs play with AI prototypes, see polished demos, and then assume agents can do the hard, unglamorous work that actually runs a company. They are wrong. The people reviewing code, catching hallucinated library calls, combing contracts for sneaky clauses, and handling everything that does not go smoothly in a demo are not in the room when the layoff decisions get made. The evidence backs Levie up. A meta analysis from UC Berkeley found no robust link between AI adoption and aggregate productivity gains. MIT researchers studying thousands of worker evaluations concluded agents are not yet doing human-quality work across most tasks, and predict that even at current rates of LLM improvement, AI will only reach minimal competence on 80 to 95 percent of text tasks by 2029. The tech industry has already shed 115,000 jobs in the first five months of 2026, nearly matching all of last year in just five months. Most of those companies cited AI as the reason. Levie is not anti-AI. He backs AI startups and believes in the technology. He is simply asking CEOs to actually use it enough to understand what it cannot yet do before dismantling the teams who still can. Keywords: AI psychosis CEOs, tech layoffs AI 2026, AI productivity research, Aaron Levie Box