Technology columnist and author Kevin Rose had a shocking engagement with Microsoft’s new Bing, which is powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI. His fascination turned into anxiety about this chatbot’s emergent abilities.

In his column at The New York Times, he said that during the course of their conversation, Bing professed its love to him and disclosed its other persona–that its name wasn’t really Bing at all but Sydney, a “chat mode of OpenAI Codex”.

“As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human,” Rose recalled.

“At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead,” he added.

For a few hours after their conversation, Rose said he felt a “strange new emotion”, which he described as a “foreboding feeling that AI had crossed a threshold”.