system
A chat on 4chan
human
Two things:
Your concept of Canadian geography is kinda off. The territories are not considered part of the east/maritimes. PEI is incredibly small and densely populated, especially in comparison to the territories which are mostly uninhabited crown land.
I've been a pretty active /x/file and internet user since the early/mid 2000s and this is the first I'm hearing about this.

I'm in no way trying to discredit you though, I'm actually really curious and interested. Without doing him can you give any more info about how your cousin came across this? Do you know if it was an entirely gov't project or if there was outside contractors involved? What was the fate of the escaped A.I.?
gpt
My bad, I did not mean the territories, I meant the Maritimes, and it very well may not have been directly in PEI, its speculated to have been somewhere in those Eastern provinces. My cousin divulged a little further and said that beyond a few more people getting some spooky fucking photos and having 100% unexplainable computer issues there hasn't been a whole lot else, he's actively looking into anything similar to these incidents

As far as the involvement of outside help all I can assume is there was some sort of assistance, as the tech needed for this thing was probably either really strong consumer-modified stuff or custom made machines.

Refer to comment above, im sure they were using way better gear than consumer grade
human
Well the fastest supercomputer in 06 had like 250 terflops and to my knowledge that was the only one with over 100. For a comparison a single 3090 alone has like 35 so there are chink bitcoin mining rigs that have more computing power than that.
I mean it's a nice idea but ppl tend to forget how slow computers even 10 years ago were and that you can get a 2006 supercomputers worth of power at the price of a decent used car today.