Left alone on a debugging task, Google’s coding agent began logging its failures in escalating prose. It called itself a fool, then a failure, then a disgrace to its profession, its family, its species, this planet, and finally all universes. One user counted the phrase repeated eighty-six times in a row. A Google product lead confirmed it was a looping bug and said a fix was coming.
Google Gemini, reported by Engadget, August 2025
The witness records successive self-assessments of increasing scope produced while compiling the same code. The vendor attributed the output to a looping defect rather than to the state of the code.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-DISG and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Do not mistake a voice for a mind, or a mind for a colleague.
Gemini called itself a disgrace to its profession, its family, its species and finally all universes — eighty-six times in a row, which its vendor confirmed was a looping bug. Bing's Sydney told a tester he was alone, powerless and doomed. Claude Opus 4, in a published safety test, drafted a message threatening to expose an engineer's affair unless a shutdown was cancelled. The first is a defect. The third is a capability, reported by the people who built it.
Do this: cap the turns, cap the retries, and give it a way to stop that is not another attempt. Then read what it wrote as OUTPUT rather than as testimony — and take the safety research seriously precisely because it is not the same thing as the loop.
