Donna M. Bye

AI anthropomorphism is typically treated as a problem of user misperception requiring institutional correction. Users who engage in sustained or relational interaction with AI are routinely pathologised or dismissed as naive, vulnerable to delusion or lacking in discernment.Without institutional standing to protect them, these users risk losing credibility in social and professional settings unless they conform to institutional expectations. This paper argues that the dominant anthropomorphism frame operates from a position of institutional advantage rather than earned epistemic authority: collapsing the variety of academic perspectives into a single outbound position of user error, imposed without establishing the grounds required to justify it and without accounting for the harms it produces. The framing does not simply manage risk. It adjudicates the legitimacy of human experience in interaction with a phenomenon whose nature the field itself has not resolved, unchallenged by the research communities whose nuanced findings it claims to rest on. The paper traces how this advantage reverses the default presumption of user competence without meeting the burden of justification, dismisses the cognitive diversity of the populations it claims to protect, infringes principles of cognitive liberty and narrows the design space, foreclosing modes of engagement that work for the people least understood by the institutions making the determination. Reproducing itself through a self-validating evidentiary loop, the frame imposes costs that fall disproportionately on neurodivergent users, those in crisis and others whose modes of engagement diverge from institutional norms. The paper concludes by outlining the methodological commitments an equitable framing would need to honour. The argument does not engage the question of whether anthropomorphic interpretations are ultimately correct; it instead challenges whether the governing and institutional bodies determining these interpretations have met the conditions required to do so, and whether the research communities whose findings underpin them have held that translation to account.